"WalMart Creates Jobs, Creates Personal Wealth, and Sustains the Economy With Its Lower Prices."

[The Cleaner]

Do you believe this is true? Why or why not?

[Greyhound]

1. and don't forget to show your work and cite your sources.

Assignments turned in late will not be accepted without the professors approval.

[tridim]

2. It's not true

and the fact that Walmart has to air advertising to feed us these lies reinforces that untruth.

Walmart destroys jobs, stagnates and steals personal wealth and is destroying the American economy while strengthening the Chinese economy.

[liberal N proud]

3. Personal experience here...

Our family has dedicated 20+ years to Wal-Mart and it is time to move on.
We are nowhere near rich.

20 years ago, you could work for them, buy stock through an excellent matching program and the stock preformed. We even used it to buy our first house. There were rumors then of people retiring from Wal-Mart with a million dollars in stock.
What happened?
Sam Walton died and all that he stood for died with him. Wal-Mart no longer promotes American made products, no longer pays livable wages and their stock has not moved in 8 years.

[Beaverhausen]

4. Why not?

http://walmartwatch.com/

[The2ndWheel]

5. How is it not true?

They do have people working in Wal-Mart. The Wal-Mart family has vast amounts of personal wealth. If we didn't consume everything every waking moment that was cheap and mass produced, we wouldn't have much of an economy.

Now just because it's true, doesn't make it right.

[samplegirl]

6. While its run everything else in the

community out!!! Can't save money when you run other local business people out. Spending lots of money on Public relations to convice you of how great Walmart benifits everyone.
BULLSHIT!

[youngdem]

7. Baloney

First, they don't sell cheap stuff, they sell CRAP...So poor in quality, you have to repurchase the item again and again.

Their prices aren't that low. Many other retailers meet or exceed their prices on many items.

They destroy small town shopping economies, destroying the middle class of shop owners, managers and skilled employees. They are then forced to change fields or take a $7.00/hr job with the company that killed them.

They offer NO healthcare of any substance to any employee unless they are in upper management.

They SCALP suppliers, by demanding to see the books of the supplier to determine the margin, and then in the contract they make you sign if you want to stay in business, they reserve the rights to veto discretionary spending in the company in order to reduce costs!!! I have seen this happen personally. They do it. This is basically a hostile takeover without a purchase. Just a mob style threat.

They also destroy the American middle class by seeking goods based on price only, leading them to outsource nearly everything to China, destroying American manufacturing jobs.

They destroy infrastructure of their host cities, by complex and aggressive tax avoidance schemes. One in particular is that they act as their own bank. They send ALL sales proceeds to Arkansas directly through their own bank. In this way, they destroy competition. Here's how: A bank must make a certain percentage of their loans in the community in which the deposit is made. Therefore, local businesses would have a loan pool from which to borrow, and try to compete with Walmart.
Walmart does what it can to limit this pool by never depositing their sales in state, always sending it by their own bank to Arkansas. Poof! Local lending just takes a HUGE hit, especially in small towns where retail sales make up a huge portion of commerce.

They build such ugly fucking stores, it makes me cry. They built a huge Wallyworld in the middle of uptown New Orleans, for crying out loud. Oh, and NO ONE goes to it except for the folks from the Projects, no where near by. They are just trying to destroy Magazine shopping.

Walmart is the personification of 'capitalism' run to its extreme in the form that Americans have let it take. We need desperately to get back to making corporations earn their status - for when corporations were first created, they were created to allow a certain amount of protection to the owners who were doing risky things that helped society out.

[Warpy]

8. That's like any self serving sentence, it contains only part

of the truth. Here, I'll show you:

"WalMart Creates Jobs (in China), Creates Personal Wealth(for the Walton heirs and the top executives), and Sustains the Economy(of China) With Its Lower Prices(that reflect subpar merchandise which the newly underemployed are forced to buy because they can't afford an alternative thanks to Walmart's low wages)."

See how easy that is?

[sinkingfeeling]

9. No, I don't and I spent 2 1/2 years at WM's World HQs in Bentonville.

Initially, when Sam Walton founded Wal Mart, it was true. I knew dozens of WM employees who had been given jobs locally and a chance to buy WM stock. Some retired as millionaires. But after, Sam's death, WM turned to global expansion, cheaply made items, forcing companies to reduce their wholesale costs to WM and bringing their people to Arkansas as a condition of doing business with WM, and plumping up the bottom line by cheap labor.

[Yavin4]

10. Point by Point

1. WalMart Creates Jobs

Yes, but it also destroys jobs as well. Local merchants, mid-size merchants, etc. all fall to WalMart in competition because of its size. Also, the intense pressure that WalMart puts on its suppliers forces job cuts there. So, total net new jobs created by WalMart is probably negative or negligible.

2. Creates Personal Wealth

Yes, mostly for the original owners. Now, the great philosophical question is this: Is our nation better served with one family, the Waltons, being immensely wealthy while the overwhelming majority of the families that work for WalMart struggle every day for their own economic survival?

3. Sustains the Economy With Its Lower Prices

Ahh, the myth of "lower prices". There's no such thing as a free lunch. Yes that bag of tube socks may cost you $.50, but the real price is felt elsewhere through trade deficits with China, higher energy prices, higher taxes for the non-benefitted WalMart worker that needs healthcare, to the environmental costs, etc. etc.

[twilight_sailing]

11. I have told this story here before...

I live in Silver City, New Mexico. I suppose things were different here before Wal-Mart came here, but...

let's just skip the rest of that, who cares?


The point is that I have almost NEVER seen the same checker twice at my local Wal-Mart.

I am almost convinced that everyone in town has had a shot at working there. :)

It goes on and on and on.