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I've never understood the hatred that some people have for Walmart. We're not ever going back to the mom and pop stores, or the little country store that was in every small settlement. Times have change, and if we are to get along with the program, we have to change to whether we like it or not.

I have never stepped foot in a Walmart, fortunately I make enough money that I don’t have to shop there.

I skipped to the end, and maybe this has been addressed, but how is this Walmarts fault? My wife and I drink a lot of milk, and I buy it at places other that Walmart, because Walmart does not carry the brand that I like. All in all, milk is not as good as it used to be, and I figure it is because they remove all of the butterfat, and then replace what they want to make the milk as they want it. All that processing can't be good for the taste. I know that I get a lot of milk from different brands with off tastes. Some brands are worse than others. Big companies have the idea that they can do as they like for the bottom line, and ignore what the customer wants. It usually come to bite them in the long run. miles

I couldn't possibly agree more....

How Walmart has wielded its market power to change the face of American industry and lower labor standards in the retail sector




1. Buying billions of goods that weren’t made in America.
The vast majority of merchandise Walmart sells in the U.S. is manufactured abroad. The company searches the world for the cheapest goods possible, and this usually means buying from low-wage factories overseas. Walmart boasts of direct relationships with nearly 20,000 Chinese suppliers,4 and purchased $27 billion worth of Chinese-made goods in 2006.5 According to the Economic Policy Institute, Walmart’s trade with China alone eliminated 133,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2006 and accounted for 11.2 percent of the nation’s total job loss due to trade.6 But China is hardly the only source of Walmart goods: the company also imports from Bangladesh, Honduras, Cambodia, and a host of other countries.

2. Pushing U.S. companies to move their factories overseas.
With $419 billion in annual net sales, Walmart’s market power is so immense that the even the largest suppliers must comply with its demands for lower and lower prices because they cannot afford to have their goods taken off its shelves. Companies that used to manufacture products in the United States, from Levi’s jeans to lock maker Master Lock, were pressured to shut their U.S. factories and moved manufacturing abroad to meet Walmart’s demand for low prices.7

3. Making it easier for other U.S. retailers to buy from foreign factories.
Walmart was a leader in sourcing goods overseas, establishing a centralized purchasing system, technological infrastructure, and linkages to foreign factories that other companies imitated and built on. While researchers find that Walmart still imports disproportionately more goods than other apparel retailers,8 its innovations accelerated the use of offshore suppliers by its competitors, speeding the loss of American manufacturing jobs.

4. Forcing layoffs among its U.S. suppliers.
Even when Walmart products are made in the United States, manufacturing jobs still get eliminated as suppliers cut costs to meet Walmart’s demands for low prices. A spokesman for the National Knitwear and Sportswear Association noted that producing goods for Walmart “forces domestic manufacturers to compete, often unrealistically, with foreign suppliers who pay their help pennies on the hour.”9 A Walmart spokesperson admitted that this was the point of the company’s efforts to buy domestic goods: “one of our big objectives was to put the heat on American manufacturers to lower prices.”10 Even as manufacturing costs increase, Walmart demands that suppliers’ prices go even lower, a dynamic that helped push Kraft Foods to plan the closure of 39 factories and lay off 13,500 workers.11

5. Promoting domestic sweatshops.
Layoffs aren’t the only way manufacturers contrive to meet the low prices Walmart demands. Walmart’s domestic suppliers lower wages, cut benefits, aggressively fight employee efforts to unionize and bargain collectively, and skimp on worker comfort and safety. For example, Louisiana seafood processor C.J.’s Seafood, which sells an estimated 85 percent of its processed crawfish to Walmart, has recently come under scrutiny for allegedly abusing employees working in the U.S. on temporary immigrant visas (known as guestworker visas).12 A complaint to the U.S. Department of Labor claims that the Walmart supplier “engaged in extremely coercive employment related actions, including forcing guestworkers to work up to 24-hour shifts with no overtime pay, locking guestworkers in the plant to force them to continue to work, threatening the guestworkers with beatings to make them work faster, and threatening violence against the guestworkers’ families in Mexico after workers contacted law enforcement for assistance.”13

6. Squeezing U.S. manufacturers out of business.
Walmart’s unrelenting push for low prices eats into the profit margins of its U.S. suppliers, often weakening companies in the process. Journalist Charles Fishman provides a vivid example: Walmart provided 30 percent of Vlasic Pickles’ overall business and insisted that if the company did not allow Walmart to sell a gallon jar of pickles for the ruinously low price of $2.97, they would stop buying Vlasic’s other products. “The pickle maker had spent decades convincing consumers that they should pay a premium for its brand. Now Walmart was practically giving them away.”14 According to Fishman, Vlasic’s profit margin from pickles shrunk 25 percent or more. Nor is Vlasic alone in seeing its business cannibalized by Walmart: of the top ten companies supplying Walmart in 1994, four sought bankruptcy protection by 2006.15

7. Discouraging American innovation.
By squeezing its suppliers, Walmart leaves companies without the resources to make new investments in research and development. And once companies become dependent on Walmart as a massive purchaser, their greatest incentive is to keep producing the products Walmart has decided to sell, making it unnecessary and unprofitable to innovate.

8. Driving competitors to squeeze manufacturing.
If discount retailers like Target and Kmart want to remain competitive with Walmart, they must demand similarly low prices from suppliers. As a result, the pressures pushing down costs and propelling the elimination of American manufacturing jobs are magnified.

9. Lobbying for policies that make it easier to move U.S. jobs overseas.
According to the non-profit Center for Responsive Politics, Walmart spent $7.8 million on lobbying in 2011 alone.16 While this money was paid to influence a range of legislation, from promoting corporate tax cuts to opposing a bill to guarantee paid sick time to working people, trade policy was among the issues Walmart lobbied on most aggressively. In fact, Walmart has lobbied to make it easier to push American jobs out of the country for years, playing a key role in in lobbying for NAFTA in the early 1990s.17

10. Making growing inequality the accepted norm
Walmart has set the template for today’s economy: one in which increased economic productivity is not shared with working people, and the vast inequality that this creates is seen as normal. Today the six members of the Walton family who inherited the Walmart fortune enjoy wealth equal to that of the least-wealthy 30 percent of Americans combined.18 These billionaires are the ultimate beneficiaries of Walmart’s push to cut costs, condemning retail employees to work in poverty and American factory workers to unemployment.

Walmart is the nation’s largest employer and one of America’s most profitable companies, netting $15.7 billion in profits in 2011.19 With the great resources at its disposal, Walmart could afford to take the high road, supporting good manufacturing jobs in America by allowing for higher wages and more investment in its supply chain and paying its own employees – from retail “associates” to warehouse workers and cleaning contractors – a living wage. That would set the template for a new American economy, one in which Americans might once again “make things” and also find greater dignity and stability in selling them.

1. Demos calculations based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
2. John Nichiols, “Supreme Court Decides That Walmart's a 'Too-Big-for-Justice' Corporation,” The Nation, June 20, 2011. Citing independent market research group, IBIS World.
3. “Living Below the Line,” Wide Opportunities for Women (2011). http://www.wowonline.org/documents/WOWUSBESTLivingBelowtheLine2011.pdf
4. “Walmart China Factsheet,” Walmart Corporation, http://www.wal-martchina.com/english/walmart/index.htm.
5. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. Metropolitan Books: 2009. p 159.
6. Robert E. Scott, “The Wal-Mart Effect,” Economic Policy Institute, 2007.http://www.epi.org/publication/ib235/.
7. For an account of this history, see: Charles Fishman, “The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know,” Fast Company, December 1st, 2003, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html
8. Emek Basker and Pham Hoang Van, “Wal-Mart as Catalyst to U.S.-China Trade,” working paper, Department of Economics, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, 2007. http://economics.missouri.edu/working-papers/2007/WP0710_basker.pdf.
9. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. Metropolitan Books: 2009. p 158.
10. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. Metropolitan Books: 2009. p 157.
11. Barry Lynn, “Breaking the chain: The antitrust case against Wal-Mart,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2006. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/07/0081115.
12. Richard Rainey, “Striking guest workers from Breaux Bridge crawfish plant protest Sam's Club in Metairie,” Times-Picayune. June 06, 2012. http://www.nola.com/business/index.ssf/2012/06/striking_guest_workers_from_br.html
13. Jennifer J. Rosenbaum, “Complaint To The Wage And Hour Division: Violations of The Fair Labor Standards Act And H-2B Regulations By CJL Enterprises, Inc. Dba CJ’s Seafood and Michael Leblanc,” National Guestworker Alliance, June 2012. http://www.guestworkeralliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/CJL_DOL-complaint.pdf
14. Charles Fishman, “The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know,” Fast Company, December 1st, 2003, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html
15. Barry Lynn, “Breaking the chain: The antitrust case against Wal-Mart,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2006, http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/07/0081115.
16. “Lobbying: Wal-Mart Stores Summary 2011,” Center for Responsive Politics, http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000367&year=2011.
17. Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Harvard University Press: 2009.
18. Sylvia Allegretto, “The few, the proud, the very rich;” The Berkley Blog, UC Berkley, December 5th, 2011, http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2011/12/05/the-few-the-proud-the-very-rich/.
19. See CNN’s Fortune 500 list http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/snapshots/2255.html

All sobering comments. But what a terribly misleading subject line! I wonder if someone who livess at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. might have something to say about this?

LOL.......This just might win "Post Of The Year." Or, "Lie Of The Year."

Hatred of Walmart beyond reason, ranks right up there with Trump hatred. People hate them both without knowing the facts. miles

The only reason to hate Walmart is the scabby people who fill the isles.

And yet you have cities full of them. miles

It"s good to have options. we're not allowed to date our relatives over here.

Hey! Stop this at once!


No Walmart bashing............Walmart was sent by God.


Being a Walmart employee is 98% of most of America's retirement plan.



That and maybe a bunch of Govt stuff paid for by the others at Walmart.

I do think that the Soy-Almond juice/milk argument is sort of like blaming your loss on the Third Party.



There are three cartons of Soy Almond Juice Milk on the shelves.


100 gallons of Milk.

Oh it's easy to hare big box stores, not just Walmart. I live in a little town of maybe 3,000 on a good day, if you hold your mouth right while counting. We used to have a Hometown Shopko. I suspect it was profitable as the next department store was 60 miles down the Interstate. Walmart, Costco etc. But Shopko went down all over because of big box stores. So now if you want a new toothbrush it's either a dollar store or drive 60 miles.

You could always go with UPS/FEDEXWALMART


Its owned by the Benevolent Overlord Jeff Bezos. He loves passing minimum wage laws because he was forced to increase his minimum wage.


Might as well force others to increase their overhead if you have the money power and senators.

I became allergic to cow's milk about 10 years ago, am also allergic to soy. So, my only choice is almond milk as rice milk is like colored water. Now I buy Land-O-Lakes canola oil mixed butter. To much cow's milk or ice cream sours on my stomach. I can eat yogurt and frozen yogurt for some reason. Doc said is is a different protein molecule. I am also allergic to tomatoes and peanuts, and wheat. Have to eat rye bread. I get bloated with bread. Tomatoes cause bad heartburn. I grew up eating all of this. If I do eat anything I am allergic to, I have to take two Beano's and an allergy pill. Getting old is not fun.

I went shopping for my wife about a week ago.(Walmart) We needed eggs and butter. For some reason that section was about empty, or so I thought. There were a few boxes of each (Land O'Lakes) and they were about 200% more expensive. I shop just enough to know something was wrong. Looked around and there was another section completely full with a large selection. Land O' Lakes was about hidden and empty. Just seemed strange.

Walmart has partnered with Bloomberg and is helping Bloomberg with his anti gun agenda. Based on their partnering with Bloomberg, why would someone on the fire defend Wally World?