According to the New York Times, a secret Walmart memo reveals the corporation had numerous plans to hold down expenses by engaging in unfair hiring practices and by trying to reduce employee benefits.
Also, two websites I’ve discovered recently focus entirely on Walmart news, and both have rss feeds. Visit Walmart Watch for reference materials and activism, or get the latest news from The Writing on the Wal blog.
Rob at Cockeyed.com does a price comparison of numerous items at Walmart and Target. His conclusion — Walmart is slightly cheaper, but not by much. For the same 20 items, he spent $115.51 at Walmart, and $120.40 at Target, with Target being cheaper on 6 items.
And he isn’t factoring in the fact that Walmart is destroying America. Aside from killing independently owned mom and pop stores, Walmart is the single largest employer of people who qualify for welfare and other goverment support, because the company doesn’t pay adequate healthcare benefits, and they keep people under a certain number of hours to keep benefits down. On top of that, they ACTIVELY encourage their employees to seek out goverment welfare benefits by employing an advisor that helps their employees apply for those benefits. So if you’re paying too much in taxes, you have Walmart to blame.
And even more than that, they consistently keep women in lower paying positions in the company.
And when it comes to real estate, Walmart has a build-and-abandon policy of opening stores, closing them down, and then opening much larger stores in the same area, while refusing to sell the dead stores real estate.
Walmart advertises that all their products are made in America, and they even use an American flag in their advertising. But if you check it out, that’s not true. In fact, they buy $15 billion dollars worth of goods from China every year.
In all, I’d rather spend an extra $5 at Target and sleep better at night.