Wal-Mart — Not Evil?

Wal-Mart pays better than minimum wage and it provides career opportunities for people who have no marketable skills right out of high school.
Wal-Mart isn't Satan and the people painting the Wal-Mart is evil picture are bought and paid for by unions, that have a serious interest in getting more union members.

 

The labor law transgressions and discrimination settlements are fact and, again, please explain what was so enlightening about a puff piece written for an anti-union publication like the Post.

 

Well, for selfish reasons:

Wal-Mart, said Deutsche Bank, spends 0.3 percent of its sales--$259 billion worldwide in 2003--on advertising and allocates 3 percent of that budget to newspapers. By comparison, traditional department stores spend 4.6 percent of their sales on advertising, and most significant, appropriate 85 percent of that to newspapers.

http://www.editorsweblog.org/2004/09/growth_of_walmart_bad_news_for_1.php

Beyond that, the column in the OP says tough noogies if the small local stores die, but those stores DID tend to advertise in the local paper. It's the major reason why the town where I grew up has no significant retail downtown anymore and why the paper has barely any ads besides banks, real estate and auto dealers.

We can have our usual round-and-round arguments about whether Wal-Mart is bad for America, but there's no question it's bad for newspapers.

 

I'm indifferent when it comes to the whole Wal-Mart question. In the end, the good and bad seem to even out. But the constant villification of the union, not speaking to Jay here but wherever it happens, pisses me off.

 

Well, the writer did note that if Wal-Mart's employees unionized, it would be worth roughly $500 million in new annual dues.
So, to me, it does seem like unions have a vested interest.

As to Cran's point, dude (dudette?) I avoid Wal-Mart like the plague. Something extremely difficult to pull off in my town, but with any large institution, you are going to have problems. Wal-Mart has problems, but are they any different than any other large employer?
My guess would be that they are not and that when the incidents are broken on a per capita basis, Wal-Mart's problems would not appear to be as significant.

 

Ah, the quarterly Wal-Mart thread. Always fun.

You could substitute "Moonies" for 'Wal-Mart' in the piece and have the same level of sophistication.

What a load of drek.

Wal-Mart closed down a Quebec store because the employees managed to get a union certified. And Wal-Mart, disingenuous liars as usual, maintained they shut the store because it wasn't performing up to snuff.

 

I go where the best deals are. If it's Wal-mart, it's Wal-mart.

 

Oh, it's easy enough to rip Wal-Mart from stem to stern . . .
and their highhanded media-censorship policies should
incite everyone here.

 

Bad guess. It's the world's largest public corporation and has been involved in systematic discrimination for years.

Most recently it gathered employees into meetings where human resources managers encouraged employees not to vote Democratic because if Democratic candidates were elected the employees would then be forced to join unions.

Here's a report from Human Rights Watch that I would encourage you to read before extolling Wal-Mart's virtues:

http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2007/04/30/discounting-rights

 

And before you know it, like the last Wal-Mart thread, our resident Randian will be telling us that The Invisible Hand ended child labour.