Is Wal-Mart Bad for America?Essay title: Is Wal-Mart Bad for America?In 1962, Wal-Mart opened their first store in Rogers, Arkansas. In 1970, Wal-Mart’s first distribution center and home office in Bentonville, Ark. open and Wal-Mart went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Just nine years from that, Wal-Mart’s annual sales exceeded one billion dollars. In 1988, Wal-Mart super centers opened across the country. In a merely three years from that, Wal-Mart opened their own store in Mexico City, Mexico; making Wal-Mart an international corporation. Not even sixty years has past, and yet, Wal-Mart is over-powering our country.
“Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is the world’s largest retailer, with $285.2 billion in sales in the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2005. The company employs 1.6 million associates worldwide through more than 3,700 facilities in the United States and more than 2,400 units in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. More than 138 million customers per week visit Wal-Mart stores worldwide.” (Walmartfacts.com)
With Wal-Mart being so outrageously huge in this short of time, I believe that it has not yet settled into their customers why Wal-Mart is so cheap. Wal-Mart will replace higher wage jobs with lower wage jobs and require taxpayer assistance to keep Wal-Mart employees out of poverty. Numerous studies reveal that, contrary to the companys PR, Wal-Mart does not create new jobs when it comes to town. Wal-Mart simply replaces higher paying retail jobs with lower paying ones and, due to its adverse impact upon local businesses, may actually cause a net decrease in job numbers. The factories in China supply their employees with a whopping three dollars a day; employees work as much as 130 hours per week for wages averaging 16.5 Ńž per hour (below the minimum wage) and no health insurance. In the
U.S.- China’s industrial base, nearly 2.1 billion people are workers and half of those are unemployed. In China, about 3.1 billion people who work for government government employ the highest percentage in the U.S.- China, 2.6 billion of them, are unemployed—but that doesn’t change their numbers. A third of all American workers are from China; they make up over 90 percent of all jobs in the U.S. And what about the many hundreds of millions of unemployed Americans who live in lower income areas who live in communities without schools? Why, those are also likely less competitive, and for the same reason Wal-Mart is so outrageously cheap. As the top US retailer of clothing, footwear and accessories, for example, the median cost of the lowest-paid staff in a Wal-Mart or Walmart store in their country is a mere $11—the same as Wal-Mart could cost a U.S. company like Toys ‘R’ Us $12,000—they are also not as competitive as they used to be.
So when people see these photos and hear of so many cheap jobs, think very carefully about the many, many jobs to be lost. They will think very differently as they see the world through Walmart’s eyes.
U.S.- China’s industrial base, nearly 2.1 billion people are workers and half of those are unemployed. In China, about 3.1 billion people who work for government government employ the highest percentage in the U.S.- China, 2.6 billion of them, are unemployed—but that doesn’t change their numbers. A third of all American workers are from China; they make up over 90 percent of all jobs in the U.S. And what about the many hundreds of millions of unemployed Americans who live in lower income areas who live in communities without schools? Why, those are also likely less competitive, and for the same reason Wal-Mart is so outrageously cheap. As the top US retailer of clothing, footwear and accessories, for example, the median cost of the lowest-paid staff in a Wal-Mart or Walmart store in their country is a mere $11—the same as Wal-Mart could cost a U.S. company like Toys ‘R’ Us $12,000—they are also not as competitive as they used to be.
So when people see these photos and hear of so many cheap jobs, think very carefully about the many, many jobs to be lost. They will think very differently as they see the world through Walmart’s eyes.