WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Prices - Google Video. First off, the production quality of this doc is pretty poor. Though it’s well researched, I’m pretty sure I could have made a better looking movie. Fortunately, it is quite informative. The story is told by showing an excerpt of Walmart’s CEO saying how good they are on benefits, the environment, equal rights, labor relations, human rights in china, and community involvement, and then detailing how the company does the exact opposite. It is truly mind-blowing how Walmart is so evil in so many different ways. The movie mentions some mind blowing statistics about Walmart. For example, Walmart tells its own employees how they qualify for Medicare and food stamps because they are paid such a low wage. This basically amounts to the government subsidizing Walmart for billions of dollars every year. Another example, Walmart has 26 million square feet of abandoned stores to avoid paying county taxes. Most of the time they build a new store just a couple miles to the edge of the county’s borders. The documentary doesn’t even get to how terrible Walmart is to the producers of retail goods. You can learn more about that in a frontline special did about Walmart back in 2004. I would have never shopped their to begin with, but now I’m going to make sure as hell my parents don’t.
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this post was added on tuesday september 12th 2006 around 12pm. it was added to the longer category and was tagged: business, china, usa, video
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Chris Rock: You know what that means when someone pays you minimum wage? You know what your boss was trying to say? It’s like, “Hey if I could pay you less, I would, but it’s against the law.”
actually, they get their employees to work overtime and not pay them so they do pay less then minimum wage.
i used to work for wal-mart when i was 16. i was actually used as tool to keep the full-time people’s hours lower so they didnt have to pay them overtime. they would say “Casey - you stay later today” since I had so few regular hours. If they had opted for the full-time person (someone who actually knew something about Camera’s, TVs, etc.) they would have had to pay them overtime.
Also, there was one day where the store manager came in and said “we hear a union is coming to try to organize this store. We want you to know that unions are bad, dangerous even, and if you join them, your pay will be shit.”