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TOPIC: WalMart!!!

Posted By: countryboy Posted On: Nov 17, 2003 Views: 1635	WalMart!!! What about the store that has everything? WalMart!! Let's share our beautiful WalMart experiences, shall we?
Posted By: Kristina Posted On: Nov 17, 2003 Views: 1629	RE: WalMart!!! I love Wal-Mart, but I wouldn't want to work there, I've seen managers go off on emplyees in front of everyone and I totally think that is wrong, and during the holiday season's, I think Wal-mart should be avoided, it's a freakin mad house. Any other time though, Wal-Mart is my first pick.
Posted By: suzisuz Posted On: Nov 17, 2003 Views: 1622	RE: WalMart!!! mmmm....walmart. Wally World is like the coolest place ever!! no where else can you buy a drill and a carton of eggs at the same time. it's the local hang out where i'm from.
Posted By: Pinko Posted On: Nov 17, 2003 Views: 1611	RE: WalMart!!! Walmart is EVIL EVIL EVIL. Everytime they move in to a neighborhood, they drive all of the small stores out of business. They take once unique, fun places and homogenize them into trashy crappy faux-Americana. They pay minimum wage, most of their items come from sweatshops which mistreat and repress people from Mexico to Malasia, and the quality of their goods sucks. I Despise Walmart with a passion- who gives a **** if it's cheap? It's cheap at the expense of local businesses, it's employees wages, and the quality of life of people the world over. BOYCOTT WALMART!!!!!!!!!! But don't take my word for it: http://www.alternet.org/print.html?StoryID=12962
Posted By: gilly3 Posted On: Nov 17, 2003 Views: 1607	RE: WalMart!!! I hate walmart. No offense to all you walmart lovers out there - different strokes for different folks. I get a headache just by pulling in to the parking lot. I don't know how they manage to do it, but the parking lot is just as chaotic as the inside of the store. My headache only gets worse as I enter the store and try to find what I'm looking for. The store has little organization and is totally crowded with people and displays. I get dizzy and lost and frustrated. I can't stand to be in there. The only relief I get is that I find it truly funny to watch some of the other people that are elated to be there. They're like, "holy cow! this is 2 bucks cheaper than at that other store!". It makes me laugh. I'd pay the extra two bucks for a store with a pleasant environment. I try to limit my walmart trips to times when I'd save 50 bucks or more. A headache is worth 50 bucks. Also, I heard that if you have any trouble with something you bought, there customer service is crappy. But, that's just hearsay, I don't have any first-hand experience.
Posted By: Boxman Posted On: Nov 17, 2003 Views: 1601	RE: WalMart!!! Two things: One, at least the people in Mexico have jobs, and two, take some asprin!
Posted By: Nik Ashmost Posted On: Nov 17, 2003 Views: 1598	RE: WalMart!!! I'm no fan of Wal-Mart either. But to hate a company just for being more competitive and driving mom&pop out of business is shallow at best. Yes their tactics are suspect, but nothing other small companies don't also do to each other. Please watch the "Starbucks vs. Mom & Pop" South Park episode for the logic of that case. Yes Wal-Mart treats their employees like crap from all I've heard, but to work there is an option, not a mandate. My real question I'm wondering here though is, how do people figure that everything Wal-Mart sells is made in foreign sweatshops? Don't they sell many name-brands that you'll also find at Walgreens, Target, Shopko, etc...? If a product's made in a sweatshop maybe you should consider hating the brand instead of the store that carries it. But I'm with you Mart Haters, Wal-Mart is too religiously conservative for me. Simple as that.
Posted By: Walmart Sux! Posted On: Nov 17, 2003 Views: 1596	RE: WalMart!!! Wal-Mart is now the world’s biggest corporation, having passed ExxonMobil for the top slot. It hauls off a stunning $220 billion a year from We the People (more in revenues than the entire GDP of Israel and Ireland combined). Wal-Mart cultivates an aw-shucks, we’re-just-folks-from-Arkansas image of neighborly small-town shopkeepers trying to sell stuff cheaply to you and yours. Behind its soft homespun ads, however, is what one union leader calls "this devouring beast" of a corporation that ruthlessly stomps on workers, neighborhoods, competitors, and suppliers. Despite its claim that it slashes profits to the bone in order to deliver "Always Low Prices," Wal-Mart banks about $7 billion a year in profits, ranking it among the most profitable entities on the planet. Of the 10 richest people in the world, five are Waltons—the ruling family of the Wal-Mart empire. S. Robson Walton is ranked by London’s "Rich List 2001" as the wealthiest human on the planet, having sacked up more than $65 billion (£45.3 billion) in personal wealth and topping Bill Gates as No. 1. Wal-Mart and the Waltons got to the top the old-fashioned way—by roughing people up. The corporate ethos emanating from the Bentonville headquarters dictates two guiding principles for all managers: extract the very last penny possible from human toil, and squeeze the last dime from every supplier. With more than one million employees (three times more than General Motors), this far-flung retailer is the country’s largest private employer, and it intends to remake the image of the American workplace in its image—which is not pretty. Yes, there is the happy-faced "greeter" who welcomes shoppers into every store, and employees (or "associates," as the company grandiosely calls them) gather just before opening each morning for a pep rally, where they are all required to join in the Wal-Mart cheer: "Gimme a ‘W!’" shouts the cheerleader; "W!" the dutiful employees respond. "Gimme an A!’" And so on. Behind this manufactured cheerfulness, however, is the fact that the average employee makes only $15,000 a year for full-time work. Most are denied even this poverty income, for they’re held to part-time work. While the company brags that 70% of its workers are full-time, at Wal-Mart "full time" is 28 hours a week, meaning they gross less than $11,000 a year. Health-care benefits? Only if you’ve been there two years; then the plan hits you with such huge premiums that few can afford it—only 38% of Wal-Marters are covered. Thinking union? Get outta here! "Wal-Mart is opposed to unionization," reads a company guidebook for supervisors. "You, as a manager, are expected to support the company’s position. . . . This may mean walking a tightrope between legitimate campaigning and improper conduct." Wal-Mart is in fact rabidly anti-union, deploying teams of union-busters from Bentonville to any spot where there’s a whisper of organizing activity. "While unions might be appropriate for other companies, they have no place at Wal-Mart," a spokeswoman told a Texas Observer reporter who was covering an NLRB hearing on the company’s manhandling of 11 meat-cutters who worked at a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Jacksonville, Texas. These derring-do employees were sick of working harder and longer for the same low pay. "We signed [union] cards, and all hell broke loose," says Sidney Smith, one of the Jacksonville meat-cutters who established the first-ever Wal-Mart union in the U.S., voting in February 2000 to join the United Food and Commercial Workers. Eleven days later, Wal-Mart announced that it was closing the meat-cutting departments in all of its stores and would henceforth buy prepackaged meat elsewhere. But the repressive company didn’t stop there. As the Observer reports: "Smith was fired for theft—after a manager agreed to let him buy a box of overripe bananas for 50 cents, Smith ate one banana before paying for the box, and was judged to have stolen that banana." Wal-Mart is an unrepentant and recidivist violator of employee rights, drawing repeated convictions, fines, and the ire of judges from coast to coast. For example, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has had to file more suits against the Bentonville billionaires club for cases of disability discrimination than any other corporation. A top EEOC lawyer told Business Week, "I have never seen this kind of blatant disregard for the law." Likewise, a national class-action suit reveals an astonishing pattern of sexual discrimination at Wal-Mart (where 72% of the salespeople are women), charging that there is "a harsh, anti-woman culture in which complaints go unanswered and the women who make them are targeted for retaliation." Workers’ compensation laws, child-labor laws (1,400 violations in Maine alone), surveillance of employees—you name it, this corporation is a repeat offender. No wonder, then, that turnover in the stores is above 50% a year, with many stores having to replace 100% of their employees each year, and some reaching as high as a 300% turnover! Worldwide wage-depressor Then there’s China. For years, Wal-Mart saturated the airwaves with a "We Buy American" advertising campaign, but it was nothing more than a red-white-and-blue sham. All along, the vast majority of the products it sold were from cheap-labor hell-holes, especially China. In 1998, after several exposes of this sham, the company finally dropped its "patriotism" posture and by 2001 had even moved its worldwide purchasing headquarters to China. Today, it is the largest importer of Chinese-made products in the world, buying $10 billion worth of merchandise from several thousand Chinese factories. As Charlie Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee reports, "In country after country, factories that produce for Wal-Mart are the worst," adding that the bottom-feeding labor policy of this one corporation "is actually lowering standards in China, slashing wages and benefits, imposing long mandatory-overtime shifts, while tolerating the arbitrary firing of workers who even dare to discuss factory conditions." Wal-Mart does not want the U.S. buying public to know that its famous low prices are the product of human misery, so while it loudly proclaims that its global suppliers must comply with a corporate "code of conduct" to treat workers decently, it strictly prohibits the disclosure of any factory names and addresses, hoping to keep independent sources from witnessing the "code" in operation. Kernaghan’s NLC, acclaimed for its fact-packed reports on global working conditions, found several Chinese factories that make the toys Americans buy for their children at Wal-Mart. Seventy-one percent of the toys sold in the U.S. come from China, and Wal-Mart now sells one out of five of the toys we buy. NLC interviewed workers in China’s Guangdong Province who toil in factories making popular action figures, dolls, and other toys sold at Wal-Mart. In "Toys of Misery," a shocking 58-page report that the establishment media ignored, NLC describes: 13- to 16-hour days molding, assembling, and spray-painting toys—8 a.m. to 9 p.m. or even midnight, seven days a week, with 20-hour shifts in peak season. Even though China’s minimum wage is 31 cents an hour—which doesn’t begin to cover a person’s basic subsistence-level needs—these production workers are paid 13 cents an hour. Workers typically live in squatter shacks, seven feet by seven feet, or jammed in company dorms, with more than a dozen sharing a cubicle costing $1.95 a week for rent. They pay about $5.50 a week for lousy food. They also must pay for their own medical treatment and are fired if they are too ill to work. The work is literally sickening, since there’s no health and safety enforcement. Workers have constant headaches and nausea from paint-dust hanging in the air; the indoor temperature tops 100 degrees; protective clothing is a joke; repetitive stress disorders are rampant; and there’s no training on the health hazards of handling the plastics, glue, paint thinners, and other solvents in which these workers are immersed every day. As for Wal-Mart’s highly vaunted "code of conduct," NLC could not find a single worker who had ever seen or heard of it. These factories employ mostly young women and teenage girls. Wal-Mart, renowned for knowing every detail of its global business operations and for calculating every penny of a product’s cost, knows what goes on inside these places. Yet, when confronted with these facts, corporate honchos claim ignorance and wash their hands of the exploitation: "There will always be people who break the law," says CEO Lee Scott. "It is an issue of human greed among a few people." Those "few people" include him, other top managers, and the Walton billionaires. Each of them not only knows about their company’s exploitation, but willingly prospers from a corporate culture that demands it. "Get costs down" is Wal-Mart’s mantra and modus operandi, and that translates into a crusade to stamp down the folks who produce its goods and services, shamelessly building its low-price strategy and profits on their backs. The Wal-Mart gospel Worse, Wal-Mart is on a messianic mission to extend its exploitative ethos to the entire business world. More than 65,000 companies supply the retailer with the stuff on its shelves, and it constantly hammers each supplier about cutting their production costs deeper and deeper in order to get cheaper wholesale prices. Some companies have to open their books so Bentonville executives can red-pencil what CEO Scott terms "unnecessary costs." Of course, among the unnecessaries to him are the use of union labor and producing goods in America, and Scott is unabashed about pointing in the direction of China or other places for abysmally low production costs. He doesn’t even have to say "Move to China"—his purchasing executives demand such an impossible lowball price from suppliers that they can only meet it if they follow Wal-Mart’s labor example. With its dominance over its own 1.2 million workers and 65,000 suppliers, plus its alliances with ruthless labor abusers abroad, this one company is the world’s most powerful private force for lowering labor standards and stifling the middle-class aspirations of workers everywhere. Using its sheer size, market clout, access to capital, and massive advertising budget, the company also is squeezing out competitors and forcing its remaining rivals to adopt its price-is-everything approach. Even the big boys like Toys R Us and Kroger are daunted by the company’s brutish power, saying they’re compelled to slash wages and search the globe for sweatshop suppliers in order to compete in the downward race to match Wal-Mart’s prices. How high a price are we willing to pay for Wal-Mart’s "low-price" model? This outfit operates with an avarice, arrogance, and ambition that would make Enron blush. It hits a town or city neighborhood like a retailing neutron bomb, sucking out the economic vitality and all of the local character. And Wal-Mart’s stores now have more kill-power than ever, with its Supercenters averaging 200,000 square feet—the size of more than four football fields under one roof! These things land splat on top of any community’s sense of itself and devour local business. By slashing its retail prices way below cost when it enters a community, Wal-Mart can crush our groceries, pharmacies, hardware stores, and other retailers, then raise its prices once it has monopoly control over the market. But, say apologists for these Big-Box megastores, at least they’re creating jobs. Wrong. By crushing local businesses, this giant eliminates three decent jobs for every two Wal-Mart jobs that it creates—and a store full of part-time, poorly paid employees hardly builds the family wealth necessary to sustain a community’s middle-class living standard. Indeed, Wal-Mart operates as a massive wealth extractor. Instead of profits staying in town to be reinvested locally, the money is hauled off to Bentonville, either to be used as capital for conquering yet another town or simply to be stashed in the family vaults (the Waltons, by the way, just bought the biggest bank in Arkansas). It’s our world Why should we accept this? Is it our country, our communities, our economic destinies—or theirs? Wal-Mart’s radical remaking of our labor standards and our local economies is occurring mostly without our knowledge or consent. Poof—there goes another local business. Poof—there goes our middle-class wages. Poof—there goes another factory to China. No one voted for this . . . but there it is. While corporate ideologues might huffily assert that customers vote with their dollars, it’s an election without a campaign, conveniently ignoring that the public’s "vote" might change if we knew the real cost of Wal-Mart’s "cheap" goods—and if we actually had a chance to vote. Much to the corporation’s consternation, more and more communities are learning about this voracious powerhouse, and there’s a rising civic rebellion against it. Tremendous victories have already been won as citizens from Maine to Arizona, from the Puget Sound to the Gulf of Mexico, have organized locally and even statewide to thwart the expansionist march of the Wal-Mart juggernaut. Wal-Mart is huge, but it can be brought to heel by an aroused and organized citizenry willing to confront it in their communities, the workplace, the marketplace, the classrooms, the pulpits, the legislatures, and the voting booths. Just as the Founders rose up against the mighty British trading companies, so we can reassert our people’s sovereignty and our democratic principles over the autocratic ambitions of mighty Wal-Mart.
Posted By: Martian Molly Posted On: Nov 17, 2003 Views: 1591	RE: WalMart!!! "....Just as the Founders rose up against the mighty British trading companies, so we can reassert our people’s sovereignty and our democratic principles over the autocratic ambitions of mighty Wal-Mart." Umm, no we can't. Not until social pressures force the automatons known as "Red Blooded Americans" to care about anything but convenience. And that's not going to happen without catastrophic economic depression, the great societal 'reset' button. How many people on this thread hated wal mart? 4 of 9. How many on this thread actually and completely boycott wal mart? I'd guess 1 of 9 (guess which one?), and that's only because 9 posts are there so far. Soon it will be 1 in 20.
Posted By: Nik Ashmost Posted On: Nov 17, 2003 Views: 1588	RE: WalMart!!! Does "Walmart Sux" have an opinion of their own? Or is C&P all they can do to give an opinion? I'm sorry but I got bored of reading re-hashed rants that have been stated 1,000 times already about 2 paragraphs in. Sure Wal-Mart is anti-union, big deal? Unions aren't exactly the greatest thing anyway. So what's your point? I stand by my statement that employees of Wal-Mart are there by choice. So to pretend they're slaves is ridiculous. Sorry, I can't respond to much else said in the huge C&P, it was too boring of a read to get through. I will congratulate that poster as potentially the proud owner of the longest post ever on Todd's poll page. Way to paste man!
Posted By: gilly3 Posted On: Nov 17, 2003 Views: 1577	RE: WalMart!!! While I hate to hear these horrible things that walmart is doing, I tend to agree with Nik. Until Walmart starts utilizing slave labor or otherwise breaking the law, we can hardly complain. If no one accepted jobs that paid so poorly, Walmart couldn't survive. This is true for US Walmart store employees and foreign Walmart supplier employees. As far as foreign sweat shop labor is concerned, what is the solution? Should they pull the factories out and put them in the US? That would leave all the foreign factory workers out of jobs. The five cents a day they were making before would be cut to ZERO! How is that better? If they were so well off before the factory was put in, why did they go to work at the factory? Seems to me that the factory is GOOD for the area, not bad. Bottom line - people are letting walmart push them around and they don't have too. Assert yourselves!
Posted By: Jeff Posted On: Nov 17, 2003 Views: 1564	RE: WalMart!!! i work at K-Mart there, Walmart is like a swear word
Posted By: suzisuz Posted On: Nov 17, 2003 Views: 1555	RE: WalMart!!! Dearest Walmart Sux, you have way too much time on you hands.
Posted By: the real root of evil Posted On: Nov 17, 2003 Views: 1547	RE: WalMart!!! well, a lot of things have been said on this thread about walmart sucking and what not. most of it though is coming from second hand and third hand sources, which can be considered suspect without proper documentation. but here are some real examples of walmart's evil. from a close personal source that works at walmart i heard these accounts. case one, a woman who works at the walmart warehouse with my "friend" was involved in a terrible accident. her legs, feet, and mid section were pinned between a metal rack and a stack of pallates by a careless forklift driver. she had severe bruising of her legs and mid section. the worst of her injuries was though was her foot which was crushed. my "friend" responded to her injury and realized very quickly that she needed to go to the hospital. however the managers encouraged her not to go and convinced her not to. now the woman, who is in her late 40's/early fifties, has permanent nerve damage to her foot which could have been prevented by a trip to the hospital. i know that she should have gone and much of the blame lies on her as well, but the managers who encouraged her not to go just so they could avoid having an accident on the records are the real ass holes. the managers probably would have been more willing to let her go to the hospital if the coorporate offices did not penalize the warehouse and the managers so heavily for each accident. my two close "friends" that work at walmart are regularly dicked hours or encouraged to work overtime and then "burn" it off at some other point in the pay period. as for contributing to the nightmare, i am guilty. but not of my own volition. for i live in a community where walmart has come in and eliminated the competition, thus leaving me very few options to do my shopping. i am often forced to make my purchases at walmart for the simple reason that every cent that i can save helps me to survive on my extremely limited budget. basicaly i am to poor to be able to be dicriminate about where i spend my money. target was supposed to move into our community and provide competition, but for some reason that fell through. unfortuneately now that most of the competition has been eliminated from our community, walmarts prices are increasing. walmart may be evil, but it is just a reflection of the society that spawned it. we the people are the source of this evil. our apathy, greed, and selfishness has allwoed for the once good natured store that allowed rural communities to not have to order from sales catalogs, to grow into the hideous abomination that it is today. before we try to change the product of our own hideousness and expose its evil, we should turn our scrutiny on ourselves and try to fix the source of the problem. we must truly evolve past our basic animal desires if we are to try to fix this problem. walmart is just a symptom of the disease. (so it is long, cry me a river)
Posted By: mom&pop Posted On: Nov 18, 2003 Views: 1529	Walmart v. Toy's R Us From today's NY Post: Toys 'R' Us reported a wider third quarter loss, lowered its earnings guidance for the year and said it would close its Kids 'R' Us and Imaginarium stores to help cut costs. **The company has struggled in the face of increased competition from discount chains like Wal-Mart, which is now the nation's largest seller of toys.** Toys 'R' Us lost $38 million, or 18 cents a share, in the period, compared with a loss of $28 million, or 13 cents a share, a year ago. Sales increased 2.2 percent to $2.3 billion. John Eyler, chairman and chief executive, said it was unlikely Toys 'R' Us would meet previous earnings estimates for the year of $1.15 a share. He said earnings for the year could now fall as low as $1.05 a share. Shares of Toys 'R' Us slid $1.56, or 12 percent, to $11.18. The company said it would take a $280 million pre-tax charge, mainly to cover the cost of closing 146 Kids 'R' Us stores and 36 Imaginarium stores by the end of January. A portion of that charge also will go to cover the cost of marking down unsold inventory. Eyler has tried to reverse declines in Toys 'R' Us' business by adding more private label products that carry higher margins and being more competitive in pricing for name brand products. He also has renovated 600 stores and improved operations so that the stores are better stocked.

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