Where was this information taken from anyway? I don't see a source.
Wal-Mart sucks. This is pretty much without debate.
What gets me the most is that Wal-Mart, while having more money than some nations, still gets <i>millions</i> of dollars from the government in subsidies and eminent domain. Good god.
Do you know how much of a setback if the Walmart cooperation would have if it went under? You're talking about thousands of employees being laid off with no job or money. It's because of coorperations like Walmart that helps our economy. I won't say it helps it in the best of ways possible, but it helps.
Jojee, like I said, there was nearly nowhere to work in the area. Not any job openings at least. I am slowly finding new jobs for my friends that were there, but it is a very hard process. I mean, when a giant drops itself in a rural area with a district population of under 5k, not alot of business is going to survive. It was a Supercenter then.
Oh and shlup: http://www.talkleft.com/new_archives/010087.html
Hawkeye: Walmart going under would kill us, and Target would simply take its place with just as many problems. This is natural for money hungry conglomerates, and why I do not support laze fare, or our government's substidise the big guys policy. I also think its AMERICANS (As in the citicens) being smurfing morons about the whole walmart issue. It sucks, and yet everyone will go there mindlessly.
Wal-Mart being evil is news how?
There is no signature here. Move along.
Jesus, you guys just hate capitalism.
bipper, I can see how it might be harder for smaller towns~ :</>p Mine has well over 70k population.
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As I understand it Walmart thrives best in smaller areas where it can drive everyone out of business and establish a stranglehold on the economy. Since its a smaller town, people who have the power to do anything about it don't care. There are Walmarts where I live, but because I live in a large city, they aren't nearly as big, you see Targets a lot more and they don't really have the chance to do what they do.
I've a friend down in Waco who absolutely cannot find a job, and the only place that will really hire is Walmart (which she kinda screwed herself on by walking out on a shift earlier). As I understand it operates under that basic principle and most people have no choice but to work there or starve.
my town (well the one next to it with a walmart) has only somewhere over 30000 people, and people can still find jobs pretty easily.
now that it occurs to me, Aexoden was complaining about not having a job a while ago, and now he works at walmart, sorta ironic!
The other night I was wondering, if people used to get perscriptions filled at a pharmacy, buy clothes at a boutique, and get their food from a grocery store, what kind of non-wal-mart kind of store sold stuff like shampoo and toothpaste?
For the life of me, I could not figure it out. I was assuming that grocery stores started to emulate wal-mart's selling of toiletries, but I may be wrong on this.
If I don't shop at Walmart, I don't buy video games.
I used to work at Sam's Club (owned by WalMart).
*They paid $6.50/hour; cost of living here isn't as high as other places, but that's still nowhere near a living wage. Everyone who was supporting himself had another job on top of WalMart.
*Rather than give raises, they stressed things like buying WalMart stock with an employee discount, and "If you work hard enough you'll get a Christmas bonus".
* However shortly after I started working there, EVERYONE got a raise. It was due to some kind of regulation violation; I never quite caught the details. I had to sign a waiver of some sort though, I remember that, acknowledging that the raise satisfied the conditions of whatever rule WalMart was breaking but not paying people enough money.
* There was a class-action lawsuit brought against WalMart after I quit. Unsure what for, since I chose not to participate. I think for overtime violations.
* My store hadn't gotten in trouble, but from what I understood while working there, others had for making people work overtime without paying them properly. We had strict guidelines about never working overtime, even if told to by a manager, because they wanted to avoid further legal troubles.
* Part of our training was hours-long video propaganda about how to fend off people asking us to join a union, and how unions are evil. If someone came into the store and tried to give us any information about unions, we were to refuse it.
* Part-time workers got no benefits. Health insurance was not even an option until you worked there for one year.
* Basically everyone was part-time, with the exception of some people who had been there for a decade. That means we had to work 38 hours per week, no more and no less. If we went over that by even a matter of minutes, we were in serious trouble because WalMart would HAVE to pay us something extra. And our timecards were indeed tracked down to the minute. It would show up on your paycheck if you worked 5 minutes too few or too many.
* We got 0 days of sick / vacation time until having worked there for one year. If you wanted a day off, the policy was that you had to request it 2-3 weeks in advance. And you had to find someone to take your shift for you, yourself.
* Scheduling was automatically done via computer. It was impossible to ask for any kind of flexibility. The schedule was faxed to the store every other week, from somewhere in Texas or something. It was often done so poorly that the managers would get one schedule, and employees would get a different one.
* Turnover was extremely fast and common. It seemed like a lot of people quit there after hardly a month of work, though I'm unsure of the real numbers. Of the dozen or so people I went to training class with, I think 3 were there when I quit. And I quit after working there 4 months.
* I've never seen a store under-staffed the way this one was. Lines would be 20 people long. Customers would be absolutely enraged by the time they got to the front.
* We had to watch propaganda moves from time to time. Not exaggerating. They weren't training; they were set to Tina Turner music, and talked about how great WalMart is. They showed smiling old people pushing huge lines of carts or stocking shelves.
* Once per week, we'd have a store meeting (which I never attended, but I could hear from the break room). At the beginning of the meeting they would do a chat. "GIVE ME AN S! GIME ME AN A! GIVE ME AN M! GIVE ME A HOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAH! GIVE ME AN S!" Something like that. It scared the living crap out of me. They opened a new store building while I worked there. A bunch of corporate people flew in to oversee it. They did that chant at the store opening, and it scared the crap out of me then too.
It was clear that "low prices" was by far the driving influence of every single decision made. We were told about how everyone used calculators from the dollar store rather than computers, because it would save a few bucks. We were told about how they left the floors bare concrete instead of tiling them, because it saved money; they were proud of how barren and cold and cheap the store looked. Etc. etc.
I don't shop at Wal-Mart because I think Wal-Mart sucks. It's disorganized, things are on the floors all the time, lines are huge, I don't like the vibe when I walk in there. And I've only walked in there like 3 times.
Plus, I just hear so many bad things about Wal-Mart that I don't want to support them, not even a little bit.