WalMart as an "Evil Empire"?
Thank you, gentlemen. My wife of 33 years, who is not a PhD candidate, but has a Masters in Administration and is one of the most scrupulously honest people I know is an hourly employee at Walmart.
I know where she gets her ammunition.
The rest of you know what you can do.
I have never understood the Walmart haters. Except for unions, who hate Walmart because that is such a large pool of employees that are not unionized, hating on Walmart seems to be just what sheeple do after they watch the media promote the union agenda.
Here are a few things I have observed about Walmart:
Microsoft has created more millionaires than any other company in American history. Walmart runs a very close 2nd. To be a Microsoft created millionaire you have to be a fairly well-educated computer geek type. Walmart, on the other hand, has made millionaires out of high school graduates and on occasion, high school dropouts that got their GED. I personally know one person, a female with a GED, who started working for Walmart in the 1970s in Bentonville, Arkansas at the home office. She started off as a general office worker and after 20 years on the job she was a supervisor in her department, a very minor management type position, not even close to the level of someone like a store manager. She quit after 20 years, so she and her husband could move to Georgia (her home) to be close to her ailing mother. She arrived in Georgia with over $2 million in her investment account, every penny of it thanks to Walmart.
The biggest thing people seem to want to hate Walmart for is the destruction of local businesses. Walmart does not destroy anything.
All Walmart does is buy a piece of land, build a building on that land (providing many local construction jobs), put shelving and products in that building, hire people to work there, and open for business. (Incidentally, the typical Walmart employs over 350 people, not insignificant in the small, usually rural communities that Walmart favors)
Walmart does not force anyone to shop there. Walmart does not force anyone to quit going to the local stores. Walmart employees do not run around town with guns making people go to the Walmart to spend their money. Walmart does not destroy local businesses.
2 things destroy local businesses when Walmart comes to town. The 1st thing that causes small local businesses problems is the way business owners run those small local businesses. They aren't used to having competition, and they make no effort to be competitive. A shopper has very little selection to choose from.
Incidentally, one of the biggest slams against Walmart is that they don't pay well and don't provide benefits. Just how well do you think the local mom-and-pop general merchandise store, that Walmart is supposedly putting out of business, pays their help, which usually consists of local high school students and recent graduates that haven't gone off to college? How well do you think mom-and-pop provides benefits for those people?
The 2nd thing that destroys local businesses when a Walmart comes to town is disloyal customers. Now, the customers have a reason to not have any loyalty for the reasons stated above, the local mom-and-pop doesn't offer much in the way of selection, but good reason or not, the people who used to support the local businesses take their business to Walmart by their own choice. Walmart does not make them become Walmart customers.
The fact is, Walmart should be held up as a beacon of how American capitalism rewards hard work and leaves slackers in the dust. It started out as a single store, "Walton's Mercantile" I believe it was called, in Bentonville, Arkansas, owned by a man named Sam Walton, who had a vision and was willing to work his butt off to make that vision come true. Along the way he brought a lot of people with him who became very well off because "Mr. Sam" believed in promoting from within and rewarding hard work, regardless of level of education or where you started from.
Yes, Mr. Sam is gone, and Walmart is a huge multi-national corporation, and I will acknowledge that corporatism, instead of capitalism, now plays a big part in Walmart management. With that said, it is still something that should be held up as an example of what one man with one store in a small town can do, rather than vilified as some sort of Evil Empire, as some people do
