Consider this information before you shop at Walmart (bad for communities!)

http://wakeupwalmart.com/research /

Here are some relevant studies/research to consider before you save a few cents at Walmart:


Walmart's $4 Drugs Coming From Indian Company Whose Products Have Been Banned In US and Canada
One of Walmart's Indian drug suppliers, Ranbaxy Laboratories, LTD, has been repeatedly investigated by the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Justice for "inadequate" safeguards against contamination, falsification of records and submitting false information to the FDA. Eight months before the FDA inspected Ranbaxy's Paonta Sahib plant and found significant violations, Walmart awarded the company a "Supplier Award" for improving shipping times and performance.
Learn more about Walmart's close relationship with Ranbaxy by reading the report on our website.

WalmartSubsidyWatch.org - How Wal-Mart Uses Taxpayer Subsidies to Finance its Never-ending Growth
From Good Jobs First, the group that produced the 2004 report, Shopping for Subsidies. WalMartSubsidyWatch.org is a searchable database of Wal-Mart subsidies, Detailing 39 new subsidy deals, combined with more than 240 deals from the original 2004 report.
Learn more about Good Jobs First at http://www.goodjobsfirst.org /.

The Wal-Mart Crime Report: "Is Wal-Mart Safe?"
In May of 2001, WakeUpWalMart.com surveyed crime reports for 551 Wal-Mart stores throughout the country. "Is Wal-Mart Safe?" is the result of these efforts, which show a staggering crime rate at the sampled Wal-Mart stores. Download the report, or visit the website and search for crime at the Wal-Mart(s) in your community.

New Research Shows Wal-Mart Rigs the System to Skip Out on $2.3 Billion in State Taxes
Released April 16, 2007, This report, prepared by Citizens for Tax Justice, shows how Wal-Mart avoided billions of dollars in state taxes since 1999.

Wal-Mart and County-Wide Poverty
Released May 9, 2006, Authors Goetz and Swaminathan analyze Wal-Mart's impact on family poverty rates at the county level.

America Pays, Wal-Mart Saves - The Growing Cost of the Wal-Mart Health Care Crisis
Released by WakeUpWalMart.com in February, 2006, this report is a comprehensive analysis of reported state, federal and company data regarding Wal-Mart’s health care.

The Effects of Wal-Mart on Local Labor Markets
A study released in November 2005, estimating the effects of Wal-Mart stores on county-level employment and earnings. Among the conclusions is that in the retail sector, on average, Wal-Mart stores reduce employment by two to four percent.

Wal-Mart and Health Care: Condition Critical
This study, released in November, 2005 by the Center for a Changing Workforce, reveals how Wal-Mart, the nation's leading retailer with over 1.3 million employees, is considering even less health care coverage for its employees as a cost-saving measure.

Wal-Mart: Rolling Back Workers' Wages, Rights, and the American Dream
American Rights at Work released this report in November 2005, detailing Wal-Mart's mistreatment of its workforce and calling into question the true value of the company's "everyday low prices."

What Do We Know About Wal-Mart? An Overview of Facts and Studies for New Yorkers
The Economic Justice Project at the Brennan Center released this report in September 2005, providing a comprehensive overview of the available information on Wal-Mart’s wages and health benefits, compliance with workplace laws, cost to the taxpayer, and impact on local economies.

Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay for Wal-Mart
A 2004 report released by Congressman George Miller (D-CA), detailing how Wal-Mart’s rock bottom wages and benefits cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year in basic housing, medical, childcare, and energy needs that the retailer fails to properly cover for its employees.

Impact of the Wal-Mart Phenomenon on Rural Communities
There is strong evidence that rural communities in the United States have been more adversely impacted by the discount mass merchandisers (sometimes referred to as the Wal-Mart phenomenon) than by any other factors in recent times. Studies in Iowa have shown that some small towns lose up to 47 percent of their retail trade after 10 years of Wal-Mart stores nearby (Stone 1997).

Disclosure of major users of state provided health care
Over the last two years, 13 states have disclosed employers that are major users of state provided health insurance programs. Wal-Mart has topped the list in all the states, except Massachusetts where it was second and Wisconsin, which did not disclose the usage of employers other than Wal-Mart.

Hidden cost of Wal-Mart Jobs
A study done by Arindrajit Dube, Ph.D. and Ken Jacobs, both of UC Berkely, looking at the use of safety net programs by Wal-Mart workers in California.

The Costco Challenge: An Alternative to Wal-Martization?
A number of factors explain Costco’s success at building a retail chain both profitable and fair to its workers. But the basic formula is one the labor movement has been advocating for decades: a loyal, well-compensated workforce means a more efficient and productive one.

Wal-Mart's Pay Gap
A study done by The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), detailing how Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott's Compensation is 871 times as high as U.S. Wal-Mart Workers, and 50,000 times as much as Chinese Workers.

Is Wal-Mart Good for America?
PBS FRONTLINE explores the relationship between U.S. job losses and the American consumer's insatiable desire for bargains in "Is Wal-Mart Good for America?"
Shopping for Subsidies
In this extensively researched study, Good Jobs First shows that the Wal-mart has received more than $1 billion in economic development subsidies from state and local governments across the country. Taxpayers have helped finance not only Wal-Mart stores, but also the company’s huge network of distribution centers.

Wal-Mart: An Example of Why Workers Remain Uninsured and Underinsured
Unaffordable premiums, overly strict eligibility requirements, and major gaps in coverage characterize Wal-Mart's health insurance plan, according to this report.

Wal-Mart and County-Wide Poverty
The presence of a Wal-Mart store hinders a community's ability to move families out of poverty, according to this study. After controlling for other factors that influence poverty rates, the researchers found that those U.S. counties in which new Wal-Mart stores were built between 1987 and 1998 experienced a significantly smaller reduction in their poverty rates than those counties that did not add new Wal-Mart stores.

Job Creation or Destruction? Labor-Market Effects of Wal-Mart Expansion
Often cited and typically misrepresented by Wal-Mart supporters, this study examines the impact of the arrival of a Wal-Mart store on retail and wholesale employment. It looks at 1,749 counties that added a Wal-Mart between 1977 and 1998.

Really...if you are really interested in knowing whether shopping at Walmart is good for a community, delve in!

i don't like to support anti-union outsourcers with my shopping money.

what sucks, though, is when i buy locally, i'm still not really supporting made in the USA. shit, if you go to a high end clothing store, the stuff is still made overseas.

America needs to really rethink this manufacturing model. almost all of our current economic woes can be traced back to it.

and Walmart should be broken up through antitrust action.

SAVE A FEW PENNIES HERE AND THERE BUT THERE ARE LARGER COSTS ACROSS THE BOARD:

Wal-Mart Warns of Democratic Win
By ANN ZIMMERMAN and KRIS MAHER
August 1, 2008

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is mobilizing its store managers and department supervisors around the country to warn that if Democrats win power in November, they'll likely change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies -- including Wal-Mart.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121755649066303381.html

I get the WalMart sales fliers and go through them for shits and giggles. Their killer sale prices are consistently higher than the normal prices at Target and K-Mart. The only time the prices for anything are ACTUALLY lower is when they are underselling to try to put another store out of business. Toys R Us has been a target for years. While they haven't been very successful at killing that chain, they have almost eliminated the K-Bee Toys stores. Once the competition is gone, it is back to their inflated prices that they put "on sale" and those sale prices aren't so hot.

If you believe they are cheaper, you're a victim of advertising and I've got another bridge to sell you - FOX News is fair and balanced!

They do beat the thieving supermarket chains near me.

I read those circulars too. I shop at an independent family-owned grocery store and it is not only way cheaper, it also has much more variety and in a smaller foot print. Who needs 6' of Cheerios boxes? I live within walking distance of a Giant but rarely go in there unless it is an emergency or I need to return a RedBox rental. Giant doesn't actually sell products - it rents shelf space. Customer input is useless. Whatever company is willing to pay the most gets the space. Safeway is pretty much the same. I lived in Reston, VA for a couple of years and other than one Trader Joe's and one Whole Foods, every plaza had either a Giant or a Safeway and either an Exxon or a Mobile station - now the same company. That sucked.

Shopping for food for 2-3 people, the difference is an easily recognizable $30-50.00+ at Wally. This of course represents a critical difference to students, the poor, the elderly, the unemployed . . . which in a nutshell describes coincidentally, most of my town.

Aside from the summer farmers market from late May through September, we have exactly 0 locally owned grocery stores here, so spending 2X the "protest dollars" spent at the dump down the street for helf-rotten produce would be both unwise and void of meaning. The dumpy store survives only by the existence of a large trailer park full of desperately poor people with limited transportation options on it's back doorstep.


It always blows my mind when DU'ers who I assume believe themselves to be intelligent, stomp about, spitting their moralizations about others they know nothing of, based on the circumstances of their own lives - as if everyone lived in their circumstances, with their options. It's pitiful, and it's decidedly not a liberal behavior.

I gotta stop and get drinks on the way into work. Thankz. :smoke:

Tally.

I don't shop there. Period.

:hi:

Sorry about the snark...it wasn't directed at you. :)

and I never will.

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shop there). It had 4 refills on it. Well, I've called in the refill and it's supposed to be ready in 24 hours for pickup. Most times I've driven there, parked in the massive parking lot and then stood in line from 10 to 30 minutes before getting to the counter to 'pick-up' the pills. The last refill was ordered last Thursday. So I drive down there on Saturday afternoon and stand in line about 15 minutes to be handed 3 pills out of 90! They don't have the medicine and won't get it in until Monday. So I ask why they didn't call and tell me that and I wouldn't have made the trip. The lady says they're a 'high volume pharmacy' and fill thousands of prescriptions. I told her to keep the 3 pills and I'd come back on Monday and get the final refill. Well, guess what on Monday evening, they still haven't got the pills in a bottle for me. I stood there while the 'pick-up' guy waited for the pharmacist and while she counted out 90 tablets and he printed a label. He told me they were so busy, they just didn't have the time to go back and fill the whole prescription from last week.

When I examine the tablets, I see that they don't look at all like what I've been taking. I still had a couple from before, so yesterday, I brought both bottles into work and googled the pills. The new ones do turn out to be the same stuff but from a different manufacturer. I will now go look at where that manufacturer resides!

I will never take a prescription to Wal-Mart again.

She took them back 3 times before WM finally realized they had switched the lenses.

.

that works there. This walmart happens to hire allot of people in our area. I know they aren't the best company and they are destroying america but what are people to do when these are the only jobs in the area? I want to support the people in our community who work very hard at walmart. I don't shop there because I love walmart. I shop to support my relative and friends who work there. Those are the facts. Plus most people around here aren't rich and this is one of the only places we can get things at an affordable price. I buy things from other places if I can afford to but usually walmart as the best buy.

my groceries from the nearest Whole Foods (189 miles away) if they are very, very concerned.

people didn't believe the WalMart propaganda about being an "all-American company" with lower prices.

Unfortunately--and this has gone on for decades--Americans will sell one another out to save a few pennies on each purchase. They have no notion of class solidarity.

Back in the 1990s, grocery workers struck Fred Meyer (a major retailer in the Pacific Northwest) when the new management started screwing over the workers, and guess who supported the strikers. Not their fellow working class people. No, it was the hippie-yuppie-countercultural types who boycotted Fred Meyer, while the people in the shabby clothes and old cars not only crossed the picket line but even called the picketers names.

We really need some class consciousness in this country. People need to be realistic about what class they're in and where their common interests lie.

A lot of people in these "communities" would still be on welfare with no future or even homeless if it weren't for walmart. Its very hard to move out of poverty when you don't have a job and your only source of income is welfare or unemployment.

By putting an average of 10 local retailers out of business for every supercenter they open WM destroys good local jobs and instead provides crappy jobs farther away that pay less and don't provide health insurance.

in the numbers and form they once existed. Neither will the mom & pop grocery stores, who can't afford to pay competitive wages or offer benefits in a modern economy anyway.

In the absence of Wally, some other repugnant corporation will only rise to take it's place. Far better to reform the rules Wal*Mart must live by from the top - because at this point, sad as it is, we can no sooner return to mom & pops on every corner than we can the 100 acre farm as the sustainable norm.

Costco CEO Finds Pro-Worker Means Profitability
High Wages, Employee Benefits Build Loyalty -- and P.R. Ambassadors

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Business/story?id=1362779

And others simply can't afford the luxury of shopping for their groceries as they would prefer, or in ways designed to please the sensibilities of others.

are claiming. Many Wal-Mart shoppers are just plain ignorant of not only the dynamics of the U.S. retail market, but of their own household needs. For every person so poor that he or she can't buy groceries at a local market or some other alternative to W-M, I'll bet there are MANY who wander through the dismal aisles of a Supercenter, picking up useless crap that won't make them one bit happier or healthier. This kind of shopping is an addiction just as surely as tobacco or meth is, and Wal-Mart is the pusher of record in the United States.

I am going to buy "Irony for Dummies". Do you think they have that at Target?