How do you feel about Wal-Mart?

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-04-2008
How do you feel about Wal-Mart?
383
Wed, 11-26-2008 - 6:23pm

I read this op/ed (it's tied in with the automotive industry issues) http://www.indystar.com/article/20081119/OPINION12/811190304/1301/ARCHIVE the other day and it got me thinking. I've always heard about the lousy way they treat their employees but...it's their prices that keep me going back. Since I've moved to the South it's been even worse. They have Super Wal-Marts here where there is a grocery store in the Wal-Mart.

Now, there was an article the other day in my local newspaper with the mayor asking people to do their Christmas shopping downtown and buy local to support our mom & pop stores. Now, I'd love to do that but I have three kids and you know where I'm going.

Part of me really doesn't like what Wal-Mart stands for but the other part of me feels like "why should I pay more when I know I can get it cheaper there?"

Any thoughts?

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iVillage Member
Registered: 11-20-2008
Sun, 11-30-2008 - 11:03pm
There are actually quite a few. The schools in my district do - and sing pretty religious songs as well. Seems as long as they sing songs from many different religions they get away with it, at least until someone complains.
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iVillage Member
Registered: 11-26-2008
Sun, 11-30-2008 - 11:18pm

((What does Wal-Mart do that is "unethical?"))


I, along with others, have already listed the unethical practices and human rights violations.

iVillage Member
Registered: 11-26-2008
Sun, 11-30-2008 - 11:20pm
My son's school does.
iVillage Member
Registered: 11-19-2008
Sun, 11-30-2008 - 11:20pm

>>> This saddens me. It is sad to think that those of us who choose not to support those we know are violating human rights are considered hypocrites, because there are other areas where we may, unknowingly, support companies that also violate human rights.

The only reason you don't know is that you didn't care to know. The information is available if you "care" enough to search it out...most "caring" people don't.

>>> I believe in a God that holds us responsible to treat others the way we'd want to be treated. That doesn't only apply to my personal relationships. I try my best to apply that to all. I don't do it perfectly - not even close - but I do it to the best of my ability.

Wouldn't a belief like that demand that you research the origins and conditions of every product you buy to make sure that no one "suffered" to provide it for you?

>>> It's called integrity, and it's important to me.

For a lot of people, integrity only extends as far as convenience and self-interest. You can listen to them bleed about the plight of the American worker while they're driving their Mercedes and sip their French wine.

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-20-2008
Sun, 11-30-2008 - 11:22pm

"Costco's average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Sam's Club. And Costco's health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/business/yourmoney/17costco.html

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-20-2008
Sun, 11-30-2008 - 11:24pm

"There's nothing socialistic about it at all. It's economic darwinism."

I see. And how well did that theory test out over the past 8 years? Now we are in the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression with the government frantically backpeddling to try to avoid another one.

iVillage Member
Registered: 11-26-2008
Sun, 11-30-2008 - 11:25pm

((The only reason you don't know is that you didn't care to know. The information is available if you "care" enough to search it out...most "caring" people don't.))


You don't know me, or my purchasing practices, from a hole in the ground.


((Wouldn't a belief like that demand that you research the origins and conditions of every product you buy to make sure that no one "suffered" to provide it for you?))


Yes, it is the reason I don't shop at Walmart.

iVillage Member
Registered: 02-19-2008
Sun, 11-30-2008 - 11:45pm

"Or people who blindly follow the hollow mantra of 'low, low prices' without looking closely to verify the accuracy of the claim."

Lets look - http://walmartstores.com/download/3097.pdf

“Consumers who seek to purchase their groceries as inexpensively as possible benefit from the presence of Supercenters.” (The Effect of Wal-Mart Supercenters on Grocery Prices in New England, Richard J. Volpe III and Nathalie Lavoie, Review of Agricultural Economics, 30 (1):4-26, 2008).

“ has reduced prices on hundreds of food products by as much as 30 percent this past year.” (Wal-Mart Helping Consumers Navigate a Transforming Economy, Times and Trends, Information Resources, Inc., 2008).

“Yet Wal-Mart saves consumers a significant amount of money that they can then spend on other goods and services…” (Does Small Business Decline When Wal-Mart Enters the Market? Has Wal-Mart Buried Mom and Pop?, Andrea M. Dean and Russell S. Sobel, West Virginia University, Regulations, 2008).

“Wal-Mart’s own prices on the basket of food items in our study are about 10% lower than its competitors…” (The Evolving Food Chain: Competitive Effects of Wal-Mart’s Entry into the Supermarket Industry, Emek Basker and Michael Noel, The University of Missouri and the University of California-San Diego, June 2007).

“Wal-Mart’s entry tends to lower prices that incumbent competitors charge, and, in that way indirectly affects even consumers who shop elsewhere.” (The Causes and Consequences of Wal-Mart’s Growth, Emek Basker, University of Missouri, April 2007).

Wal-Mart has lowered retail prices and increased the true disposable income of individuals, then it is likely to have increased personal savings as well.” (The Wal-Mart Revolution: How Big-Box Stores Benefit Consumers, Workers, and the Economy, Richard Vedder and Wendell Cox, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Washington D.C., 2006).

“Wal-Mart’s food prices are estimated to be anywhere from 8-27% lower than large supermarket chains for an identical market basket across different U.S. metropolitan areas.” (The Local Costs and Benefits of Wal-Mart, Elena G. Irwin and Jill Clark, The Ohio State University, February 23, 2006).

http://www.stretcher.com/stories/04/04sep27h.cfm

"I thought you might be interested in my "system" for grocery shopping. I have five kids, three in diapers, and I homeschool so we are all home for snacks and lunches everyday.The keys to my success are my price box, my list, and my grocery ads! I very often shop with five small children (all under age six) and found I just couldn't juggle lists, menus, a price book, grocery ads, and a calculator, so I combined them.

The first thing I do is shop at our local Wal-Mart Supercenter, because they match all competitor ads. There are five other major grocery chains in my area, so I can get the best prices and loss leaders without visiting six different places. Check around and call local grocery stores to see if they will match prices. Wal-Mart doesn't match "buy one get one free" offers, however, so I might visit another chain store if they are having a big sale."

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4PRN/is_/ai_n28093271

"Walmart's newest ad notes shoppers spending $100 per week at a supermarket could save on average more than $700 a year by purchasing the same kind of packaged grocery products at Walmart. The ad is supported by a recent independent study from Global Insight on comparative packaged grocery prices, showing overall that Americans shopping at supermarkets could have saved more than $21 billion last year by purchasing the same categories of food at Walmart."

http://books.google.com/books?id=oq2pgMztlzsC&pg=PA201&lpg=PA201&dq=consider+a+family+of+two+adults+and+two+kids+with+an+average+income+of+%2452,000&source=web&ots=UOV2mufLED&sig=SdiY51yR2A7S7AUwm0FSy5SdvtQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result

"In 2004, Wal-Mart shoppers spent $124 billion on groceries. That food, purchased at other supermarkets, would have cost $146 billion. So Wal-Mart grocery shoppers alone saved $22 billion.

If the rest of the merchandise Wal-Mart sells is just 5 percent cheaper than at competing stores, that's another $8 billion.

So a conservative estimate is that the people who shopped at Wal-Mart last year saved $30 billion. - that's the equivalent of a $270 Walmart rebate check for every family in America every year.

But no one shops `on average," and the figures have more immediacy, more power, at the level of a family. Consider a family of two adults and two kids, with an annual income of $52,000 A family like that might easily spend $125 a week on groceries, or $500 a month. If Wal-Mart comes to town, and they can save 15 percent on their groceries, that comes to $75 a month.

That $75 adds up to $900 over the course of a year—it's the equivalent of an extra weekly paycheck; it's more than seven weeks of free groceries. And that's just the groceries.

Why would you pay more? Who can afford to pay more? Who turns down an envelope filled with $900?

In purely economic terms, the $30 billion in savings directly from Wal-Mart — not accounting for the money saved as other retailers increase their efficiency and lower their prices to compete — that $30 billion even puts in some perspective the twenty thousand U.S. families that Stephan Goetz found Wal-Mart elbowed into poverty.

Even if each of those families had an income of $52,000 before ending up impoverished (which is unlikely), and even if that meant they had no income and were on public assistance, their total lost income comes to $1 billion—one thirtieth the total direct savings. A market economy is always reallocating resources, and often those resources are actual people who lose jobs and have to find new ones."

http://www.penguin.com.au/lookinside/spotlight.cfm?SBN=9780713998252&page=extract

"Starting in the early 1990s, a change swept through a line of products that most adult Americans use every day. Until then, nearly every brand and style of deodorant-roll-on and solid, powder-fresh and unscented-came in a paperboard box. You opened the box, pulled out the container of deodorant, and pitched the box in the garbage. In the early 1990s, Wal-Mart, among other retailers, decided the paperboard box was a waste. It added nothing to the customer's deodorant experience. The product already came in a can or a plastic container that was at least as tough as the box, if not tougher. The box took up shelf space. It wasted cardboard. Shipping the weight of the cardboard wasted fuel. The box itself cost money to design, to produce – it even cost money to put the deodorant inside the box, just so the customer could take it out. With the kind of quiet but irresistible force that Wal-Mart can apply, the retailer asked deodorant makers to eliminate the box. Unbox the antiperspirant.

The box turned out to cost about a nickel for every container of deodorant. Wal-Mart typically split the savings – letting deodorant makers keep a couple pennies and passing a couple pennies in savings along to its antiperspirant customers.

Walk into a Wal-Mart today, and pause in the deodorant aisle: eight shelves of deodorant, sixty containers across. In a well-tended Wal-Mart store, nearly five hundred containers of deodorant face you. Not one box. Walk into any store now; Walgreens, Target, Eckerd, CVS, and go to the deodorant aisle. Not one box.

Whole forests have not fallen in part because of the decision made in the Wal-Mart home office at the intersection of Walton Boulevard and SW 8th Street in Bentonville, Arkansas, to eliminate the box. The nickel savings may seem trivial, until you do the math. With two hundred million adults in the United States, if you only account for the nickel on the container of deodorant in the medicine cabinet right now, that's a savings of $10 million, of which customers got to keep half, $5 million, just for one small change, unnoticed by consumers, more than a decade ago. But the change, and the savings, is recurrent, and permanent. We're saving $5 million in nickels five or six times a year – as often as we need a new container of deodorant. The nation has saved hundreds of millions of dollars since the deodorant box disappeared. It's a perfect Wal-Mart moment – the company used its insight, and its muscle, to help change the world. Millions of trees were not cut down, acres of cardboard were not manufactured only to be discarded, one billion deodorant boxes didn't end up in landfills each year. It's all unseen, all unnoticed, and all good.

At about the same time deodorant was coming out of the box, Wal-Mart was experimenting with the idea of doubling the size of some of its new stores in order to start selling groceries alongside general merchandise in a format it called supercenters. When Wal-Mart first started nudging into the grocery business, everyone in the United States already had well-established grocery-buying habits. No one was waiting for a Wal-Mart to open to buy a gallon of milk or a jar of spaghetti sauce or a package of boneless chicken breasts. The supermarket business was dominated by well-established, deeply experienced, well-run national chains. Albertsons was founded in 1939. Safeway was founded in 1915. Kroger was founded by Barney Kroger in 1883. Into that familiar group fifteen years ago stepped Wal-Mart. At the end of 1990, Wal-Mart had just nine supercenters.

Ten years later, at the end of 2000, Wal-Mart had 888 supercenters – it had opened an average of 7 new supercenters a month, 120 months in a row – and Wal-Mart was the number-one food retailer in the nation. In little more than a decade, from a standing start, Wal-Mart mastered the U.S. grocery business and remade what turned out to be a complacent industry in its wake. It is an astonishing achievement. Today WalMart sells more groceries than any company not just in the United States but in the world; it has 1,906 supercenters, 1,000 more than it had five years ago. That is, in the last five years, having already conquered the supermarket business, Wal-Mart has dramatically increased the pace of its grocery invasion; it has opened an average of 16 new supercenters a month for five years.

In groceries, as in other areas of retail, Wal-Mart isn't just the first among equals; it is unchallenged. The company that essentially didn't exist as a grocer fifteen years ago now sells more food than Kroger and Safeway combined. Nationwide, Wal-Mart has about 16 percent of the grocery market. In many individual cities, though, it has 25 or 30 percent of the grocery market – one out of four, or one of three families do their food shopping at Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart's grocery departments – in supercenters, about 40 percent of the floor space is devoted to groceries – are not particularly appealing places to shop. The aisles are long, the staffing is thin, the stocking often spotty and chaotic, the produce ample but undistinguished. But when Wal-Mart starts selling groceries in a new city – Dallas, Memphis, Oklahoma City – it quickly wins business in a simple, potent way: Its prices are about 15 percent lower on exactly the same foods sold elsewhere. You can buy fresh salmon from the Wal-Mart seafood display case for $4.84 a pound, a price so low it almost seems too good to be true. For a family of four who might spend $500.00 a month on groceries, Wal-Mart's 15 percent lower prices translate into savings of hundreds of dollars a year, just for driving to a different store.

Wal-Mart didn't just change the lives and spending habits of grocery shoppers, though. It changed the very ecosystem and rhythm of the supermarket business, often with devastating consequences for those who couldn't adjust. In the same decade that Wal-Mart has come to dominate the grocery business in the United States, thirty­one supermarket chains have sought bankruptcy protection; twentyseven of them cite competition from Wal-Mart as a factor. That, too, is the Wal-Mart effect.

Wal-Mart isn't just a store, or a huge company, or a phenomenon anymore. Wal-Mart shapes where we shop, the products we buy, and the prices we pay – even for those of us who never shop there. It reaches deep inside the operations of the companies that supply it and changes not only what they sell, but also changes how those products are packaged and presented, what the lives of the factory workers who make the products are like – it even sometimes changes the countries where those factories are located. Wal-Mart reaches around the globe, shaping the work and the lives of people who make toys in China, or raise salmon in Chile, or sew shirts in Bangladesh, even though they may never visit a Wal-Mart store in their lives.

Wal-Mart has even changed the way we think about ourselves – as shoppers, as consumers. Wal-Mart has changed our sense of quality, it has changed our sense of what a good deal is. Wal-Mart's low prices routinely reset our expectations about what all kinds of things should cost-from clothing to furniture to fresh fish. Wal-Mart has changed the lens through which we see the world.

The Wal-Mart effect touches the lives of literally every American every day. Wal-Mart reshapes the economic life of the towns and cities where it opens stores; it also reshapes the economic life of the United States – a single company that steadily, silently, purposefully moves the largest economy in history. Wal-Mart has become the most powerful, most influential company in the world."

http://mommysdeals.blogspot.com/2008/08/my-walmart-grocery-shopping-trip.html

"My Walmart Grocery Shopping Trip

I went to Walmart today. I thought I did really good for my first big grocery experience with coupons. I had two sets of the coupons from the All You magazine for free food so I decided to do this in two orders because those are confusing for cashiers. So, here's what I got.

1st Transaction
3 EZ Grip Johnson Buddies soaps-$.97 (after coupons I got these FREE)
5.57 lbs Bananas-$2.67
4 Yoplait light yogurts- $.58 each and I had a $1.00 off 4 coupon
Bread- $1.97
2 Gogurt-$2.43 each and used $1.00 off 2 coupon
2 Malt o Meal Cereal- $1.00 each and I used two $1.00 off coupons so both boxes were free.
2 Hormel Turkey Chili- $1.52 each and I used $.55 off two coupon (from a Family Circle Issue)
1 pint blueberries- $2.88
4/6pks Sunny D- $2.00 each and I used two $.55 off 2 coupons(from Aug All You Mag)
Just Bunches Cereal-$2.50 and I used $2.00 off coupon, so I paid $.50 for this!
Kashi Go Lean Crunch-$2.98 and I used a $2.00 off coupon, so I paid $.98 for this!
2 Juicy Juice 8 packs-$2.50 each and I used a $1.00 off two coupon
2 packages Bic Pens- $.88 each and I used a $1.00 off two coupon
All You Magazine- $1.77 Yes I bought another one because the free food coupons pay for this!
2 Eggo Waffles-$1.50 each and I used $1.00 off 2 from Sunday Paper coupons

Total before coupons: $47.60
Total after coupons: $33.40
Total savings: $14.20

2nd transaction
2/98% Fat Free Oscar Meyer Hot Dogs- $2.50 each (FREE with coupon)Aug All You Mag
2 Family Size Reduced Fat Wheat Thins-$2.98 each (FREE with coupon) Aug All You Mag
2 Kraft American Singles- $2.98 each (FREE with coupon) Aug All You Mag
2 Crystal Lite- $2.98 each (FREE with coupon) Aug All You Mag
2 Kraft Fat Free Italian Dressings- $1.98 (Free with coupon) Aug All You Mag
30 packages Kool-Aid- $6.00
12 pack Diet Dr. Pepper- $2.50
1 Checkout Diet Dr. Pepper- $1.25
2 Spaghetti jars(Great Value brand)- $1.25 each
Aug All You Mag- $1.77 (Yes, I bought another one!)

Total before coupons $40.17
Total after coupons $14.13
Total savings: $26.04

So, I spent $47.53 and saved $40.24!!!!! Wow!!!! That's about a 48% savings!

Actually some things were on rollback so I saved even more!"

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=312592447176484

"Will 'Wal-Mart Effect' Be Diluted By Capital's New Strain Of Politics?

By STEVEN MALANGA | Posted Wednesday, November 26, 2008 4:20 PM PT

When the American economy was humming along and consumers were spending money liberally during the second half of the 1990s, economists tried their darndest to figure out why prices weren't rising very rapidly.

While some attributed the phenomenon to productivity gains from technological innovation, McKinsey, the global consulting company, coined the phrase the "Wal-Mart Effect" to explain how the giant retailer's intense focus on keeping operating costs low and passing the savings on to consumers accounted for much of the restraint in prices.

Warren Buffett boiled that notion down to a simple formulation: Wal-Mart, not some technology giant like Microsoft, was the most important contributor to the vitality of the economy at the time.

The economic picture is quite different today, but Wal-Mart's role is no less central. As retailers like Linens 'n Things and Circuit City head into bankruptcy and even slick operators like Target warn of a steep drop in consumer demand, customers are heading to Wal-Mart for savings.

The Bentonville, Ark., based chain recently reported third-quarter sales up 7.5%, including a surprising 3% gain in stores opened for more than a year.

Retail analysts tell us that many of those stores going bust right now, like Linens 'n Things, expanded too rapidly during the good times. But Wal-Mart's march across the U.S. was as energetic as other retailers'.

The difference is that Wal-Mart expanded without ever losing its focus on operating efficiently, nor ever eschewed its custom of passing savings along to consumers. That's because Wal-Mart, which produced huge savings when it revolutionized the distribution and delivery of goods to stores on a massive scale starting in the 1970s, has never forgotten the lessons that it learned during its early years.

I remember in the midst of a steep recession in 1982 traveling the back roads of Arkansas to visit Wal-Mart stores and a distribution center as a young financial reporter and asking myself, "Can this really be the future of retailing?" Twenty-five years later, in the midst of another steep downturn, the answer to that question is obvious.

Still, the Wal-Mart Effect circa 2008 is different in several crucial ways. Two years ago, for instance, Wal-Mart saw an opportunity because of rising prescription drug prices, and it kicked off a campaign to sell generic drugs for $4 for a 30-day prescription.

The move, which the company eventually expanded to all of its pharmacies, sparked a pricing war around the country as big pharmacy chains slashed their own prices on generics. Wal-Mart estimates that Rx customers at its stores alone have saved more than $1 billion.

That might be chump change, however, compared with what's happening in the grocery business. Once primarily a general merchandise discounter, Wal-Mart embarked on rapid expansion of stores selling groceries when it noticed that local supermarket chains were taking a bigger and bigger bite out of consumers' pocketbooks — in some markets doubling their profit margins during the 1990s.

Today, Wal-Mart operates some 2,500 stores selling food items, and food prices at Wal-Mart's stores are typically from 10% to 25% lower than at competitor stores, depending on the food category.

Even if you don't shop at Wal-Mart you're likely to save 5% on your food costs when the retailer enters your market. Those savings add up, particularly for low-income households, who recognize a 6.5% increase in income from the savings of shopping at a big-box grocery store.

But Wal-Mart's march into food retailing also raised the ire of powerful food unions and helped to make the chain a persistent target of labor and its political supporters.

The fragmented grocery business in the U.S., where no national retailer before Wal-Mart played a significant role, is one of the few mass market sectors in which organized labor is still a force, composing about 20% of the work force, compared with just 5% of general merchandise workers.

(Few of Wal-Mart's general merchandise competitors, like Target or Kohl's or Kmart, are unionized).

Grocery unions have watched Wal-Mart's entry into their business with growing alarm, which reached a crescendo during the 2004 Los Angeles-area supermarket workers strike, when Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry visited the picket lines in support of workers.

Although Wal-Mart was not even operating in that market, just the sight of the company rolling out its combined food/mass merchandise stores elsewhere was enough to prompt a face-off between unions and supermarkets over wages and benefits. That battle, with Wal-Mart as the subtext during a presidential campaign, helped to galvanize every anti-Wal-Mart constituency.

This disparate group united in their single-minded loathing of the chain includes:

— Anti-globalists who blame Wal-Mart for the decline in American manufacturing (as if, if Wal-Mart didn't exist, no other retailer would have figured out consumers might be interested in buying clothes imported from overseas that cost less).

— Anti-sprawl activists who blame Wal-Mart for the decline of urban downtown shopping.

— Rural chambers of commerce, who blame Wal-Mart for the decline of Main Street shopping.

— Feminists who are rankled that Wal-Mart won't force its pharmacy employees who object to the morning-after pill to dispense it (instead, those employees are allowed to pass the customer on to another Wal-Mart associate).

Members of Wal-Mart's founding family, the descendants of Sam Walton, have also angered activists and made the business a target because they have used their fortune to support conservative and free-market causes, especially the choice movement in public education.

Apparently, it's one thing to use the family fortune to back anti-smoking initiatives in the developing world, like New York Mayor Bloomberg's foundation has done, or to advocate for the rights of prostitutes in Africa, as George Soros' Open Society has done, but quite another to promote free-market principles here in the U.S.

Still, despite the unique ability of Wal-Mart to drive a certain type of activist into a frenzy, consumers have mostly just yawned at the anti-Wal-Mart hysteria. Its stores remain the overwhelming shopping favorite of more Americans than any other retailer. Moreover, even in those days when unemployment in America hovered below 5%, thousands of people lined up to apply for a job when Wal-Mart opened a new store.

Wal-Mart's contribution to American economic progress has been recognized among a diverse ideological group of economists. Most representative, perhaps, is a paper by Jason Furman, one of President-elect Obama's economic advisors, titled "Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story."

Furman acknowledges that productivity is the main engine of economic progress and that Wal-Mart has pushed much of the retail sector to follow it along a path of lower prices, benefiting low income households the most. Along the way Furman demolishes many of the typical criticisms of Wal-Mart.

He notes, for instance, that calls by activists that Wal-Mart pay its entry-level workers more fail to acknowledge that Wal-Mart's overall margin of profits-to-revenues is small, as are its profits-per-worker, and that other retailers with higher salary scales serve a different, more upscale customer.

Furman also disputes the notion that Wal-Mart benefits from "corporate welfare" because some of its workers (4.5% to be precise) are on Medicaid, noting that for entry-level workers, the choice of Medicaid over a company-sponsored plan that requires co-pays simply makes economic sense, and that the benefits of the program accrue to the worker, not Wal-Mart.

Furman's principal criticism of Wal-Mart is that as a company that serves millions of low-income households and employs so many entry-level workers, it should be doing more to advocate on the national stage for policies to help those at the bottom of the income scale, from expanding the earned income-tax credit to lobbying for ways to expand health care coverage in the U.S.

Still, it's difficult to gauge how the Wal-Mart sector — that is, the segment of retailing that includes the chain itself and every other operator forced to compete with it — will fare in the new politics of Washington.

Early in the presidential campaign Obama was vying with John Edwards for the title of Wal-Mart basher, but as the campaign evolved during the financial crisis, that sort of talk evaporated.

But there is much that could be done in Washington to undermine the progressive success story that is Wal-Mart — from rising tariffs and other protectionist measures that would increase the cost of imported goods, to passage of the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act, which could set off a series of labor-management battles and prompt Wal-Mart and its competitors to rethink some of their expansion plans in the face of potentially higher employee costs.

That would be the wrong kind of Wal-Mart Effect."

mccain image

Obama image
iVillage Member
Registered: 11-19-2008
Mon, 12-01-2008 - 12:26am
I suppose, in many cases, ethics and integrity only go as far as convenience. It's easy to hate Wal-Mart, but why go to the trouble of investigating the other stores you frequent? Where does your favorite dress store get it's goods? Are you sure that each piece...or even each piece of each piece...is made by employees who are not doing jobs outsourced from America, and who are paid a living wage in super clean facilities? Have you checked to make sure that the lettuce for your salad wasn't picked by illegal immigrants working for low wages and no benefits? I mean, there "caring" and then there's "caring."
iVillage Member
Registered: 11-22-2008
Mon, 12-01-2008 - 12:51am

"By definition, then, a business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. A niche market may be thought of as a narrowly defined group of potential customers."


You did notice the words you wrote?

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