GameFairy U forgot one!!!!!
Walmart – And the Destruction of our Economy“Wal-Mart is not just the world's largest retailer. It's the world's largest company--bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what Number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. And in its own category of general merchandise and groceries, Wal-Mart no longer has any real rivals. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined. "Clearly," says Edward Fox, head of Southern Methodist University's J.C. Penney Center for Retailing Excellence, "Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer has ever been." It is, in fact, so big and so furtively powerful as to have become an entirely different order of corporate being.”
"People ask, 'How can it be bad for things to come into the U.S. cheaply? How can it be bad to have a bargain at Wal-Mart?' Sure, it's held inflation down, and it's great to have bargains," says Dobbins. "But you can't buy anything if you're not employed. We are shopping ourselves out of jobs."
“Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.”"You won't hear anything negative from most people," says Paul Kelly, founder of Silvermine Consulting Group, a company that helps businesses work more effectively with retailers. "It would be committing suicide. If Wal-Mart takes something the wrong way, it's like Saddam Hussein. You just don't want to piss them off."
“Believe it or not, American business has been through this before. The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., the grocery-store chain, stood astride the U.S. market in the 1920s and 1930s with a dominance that has likely never been duplicated. At its peak, A&P had five times the number of stores Wal-Mart has now (although much smaller ones), and at one point, it owned 80% of the supermarket business. Some of the antipredatory-pricing laws in use today were inspired by A&P's attempts to muscle its suppliers.”
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html
And here is another great article on Walmart. That little “smile” Walmart uses in their advertising should have horns!
http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2002-05-08/news.html
Usually, I don’t start an article with excerpts from another source, however, in this instance, it is important to set the stage for this destructive, greedy, and illegal company that daily, is destroying the American economy.
Yes, I said illegal!
I am only a layman in matters of law, but doesn’t Walmart now qualify as a monopoly? Didn’t we enact laws to protect the public from companies that viciously put competitors out of business, and have such a strangle-hold on their particular business that it represents an unfair advantage to other businesses? Hmmm, I thought so, but because they are now so strong, and control most of Washington with their lobbyists, it is “politically incorrect” to even try to make Walmart observe our anti-trust laws.
Think, just sit back for a while and examine the effect of Walmart on the American economy:
When we joyously go to Walmart to buy these great bargains, bargains that most other stores cannot compete with, what are we, as Americans, doing to our own economy? Look at the massive restructuring of Corporate America, the loss of health care benefits, less stock options, no retirement, and the list goes on and on… Could Walmart be responsible for any of these events? YES! Absolutely!
Walmart is now so huge, so oppressive, that they tell a manufacturer what they will pay for their product; no negotiation, Walmart simply states what they will pay, and if the company doesn’t like it, no more doing business with the largest company in the world.If you were a CEO, what would you do? Maybe reduce benefits, chop retirement, use cheaper suppliers, reduce the quality of their products, and demand more productivity from their employees; and there has even been cases when they have asked employees to take reductions in salary, all to do business with Walmart.
If the company says no, as several have done, the product immediately gets out-sourced to China, Malaysia, Mexico, or anywhere that Walmart can find cheap labor and increase their world domination in retailing almost everything the everyday American uses…. In fact, Walmart is now becoming dominant in other countries, and their economies are suffering too. Have you read about Mexico lately??
What do we do and how can this situation be remedied? Well folks, this won’t be easy. Walmart is so intricately entrenched in America’s retailing that an estimated 25% of all big rigs on the highways are hauling for Walmart! (Heard this figure quoted last year – it may be higher now.) How do we dismantle this giant without serious and possibly apocalyptic consequences to our economy?
In this case, I don’t have the answers, but one answer I do hold true is that Walmart, just like AT&T and Microsoft, are not above the law, and our Congress and legislators need to get on the ball and figure this one out. Most of Washington is benefiting from Walmart in the way of political contributions, high-powered lobbyists, and lord only knows what else. This is a case where the people have to pound Washington and DEMAND that something must be done. NO company is above the law. Not even Walmart!
~RG
