The High Cost of Low Price

"Why is it that a corporation that in 2003 had an outstanding $240 billion in sales will not provide a livable wage and affordable health care for their employees? There's no where around that there's a company that makes this much money and still turns around and makes their associates go to the state for aid."

The film presents an unfavorable picture of Wal-Mart's business practices through interviews with former employees, small business owners, and footage of Wal-Mart executives. The film intersperses statistics between the interviews to provide large-scale examinations beyond personal opinions. [excerpt from wikipedia]

The film features the deeply personal stories and everyday lives of families and communities struggling to survive in a Wal-Mart world. It's an emotional journey that will challenge the way you think, feel... and shop.

Walmart pulls in billions every year but barely pays its workers a living wage. Not only that but they’ve aggressively resisted efforts among workers to unionize. Walmart’s slogan is Save Money, Live Better. As Vikki Gill, a former Walmart store manager in Illinois says, the company is saving money and living better at the associate’s expense. In this documentary from Walmart Workers for Change, employees discuss their fight for a living wage, union representation, and decent benefits. Walmart’s union busting tactics are notorious but Union Federation Change to Win has been turning up the heat lately and says efforts to unionize are underway at over 100 stores[source]

Families, churches, schools, and small busineses owners have screened the film over 10,000 times and the world is taking notice. [source]

The closest Wal-Mart to me is about 20 miles away, and there isn't another within 50 miles. The prices at this particular Wal-Mart are about .45 - .55 cents higher than a Food Lion, or Piggy Wiggly, and even Wal-Mart that is in Charleston. I'm a smart shopper, so I can notice price changes within different grocery stores off the top. I went into town one weekend and we stopped at Wal-Mart, that is when I noticed the price of Lysol there was $6.25...the price for Lysol at any other store is always 4.99 to 5.25, and could be found at a dollar store for 3.99. Where are the savings? Are they screwing the poor, uneducated?

This reminds me of the "Pickle" story. The giant retailer's low prices often come with a high cost.

A gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is something to behold. The jar is the size of a small aquarium. The fat green pickles, floating in swampy juice, look reptilian, their shapes exaggerated by the glass. It weighs 12 pounds, too big to carry with one hand. The gallon jar of pickles is a display of abundance and excess; it is entrancing, and also vaguely unsettling. This is the product that Wal-Mart fell in love with: Vlasic's gallon jar of pickles.

Wal-Mart priced it at $2.97--a year's supply of pickles for less than $3! "They were using it as a 'statement' item," says Pat Hunn, who calls himself the "mad scientist" of Vlasic's gallon jar. "Wal-Mart was putting it before consumers, saying, This represents what Wal-Mart's about. You can buy a stinkin' gallon of pickles for $2.97. And it's the nation's number-one brand."

Therein lies the basic conundrum of doing business with the world's largest retailer. By selling a gallon of kosher dills for less than most grocers sell a quart, Wal-Mart may have provided a ser-vice for its customers. But what did it do for Vlasic? The pickle maker had spent decades convincing customers that they should pay a premium for its brand. Now Wal-Mart was practically giving them away. Vlasic has never been able to recover from the losses coupled by the fevered buying spree that resulted. This distorted every aspect of Vlasic's operations, from farm field to factory to financial statement.

Indeed, as Vlasic discovered, the real story of Wal-Mart, the story that never gets told, is the story of the pressure the biggest retailer relentlessly applies to its suppliers in the name of bringing us "every day low prices." It's the story of what that pressure does to the companies Wal-Mart does business with, to U.S. manufacturing, and to the economy as a whole. That story can be found floating in a gallon jar of pickles at Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is not just the world's largest retailer. It's the world's largest company--bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. And in its own category of general merchandise and groceries, Wal-Mart no longer has any real rivals. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined. "Clearly," says Edward Fox, head of Southern Methodist University's J.C. Penney Center for Retailing Excellence, "Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer has ever been." It is, in fact, so big and so furtively powerful as to have become an entirely different order of corporate being. [continue reading]

There is also the recent story regarding the parents that had film developed. Let's say you take some pics of your kids (ages 1½, 4, and 5) at bath time, and then you go have them developed at Walmart.

The Walmart employee sees the pics and calls the cops on you for child porn. Your kids are taken away and you don't regain custody for a month.

That's exactly what Lisa and Anthony "A.J." Demaree of Arizona say happened to them ... and now they are suing Walmart.

Richard Treon, the Demarees' attorney, said the seven to eight bath- and playtime photos of the girls were only part of the 144 photographs from the family's vacation in San Diego.

"There was nothing sexual about it," Treon told WTOP "This is a parent's worst nightmare." [continue reading]

"I find Wal-Mart to be very dirty, understocked, with low quality food, and the last time I shopped at Wal-Mart I purchased a dozen eggs and found that a few were covered with a fecal matter.  Plus, it's a breeding ground for bacteria and germs"

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