Last week, my post on What Happens To Your Clothes received lots of great feedback from you! Thank you! I’m happy to know that you care about where your clothes go.  On that note (and with inspiration from a friend), I was reminded about the evil that is Wal-Mart. I refuse to shop there. Plenty of others feel the same way, but unfortunately considering their yearly profit is a larger economy than Sweden, there continues to be a large misunderstanding of what the company really represents (Source).

This all started when I watched Walmartopia on my first solo trip to New York. And then I watched Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. Talk about eye opener. When I began to do research in college, I was overwhelmed at the amount of information I found. Wal-Mart doesn’t take care of their employees, they discriminate, they barely give to charity, and they run companies out of business in order to get the lowest price in the market (Source). I’ve shared these facts with my friends and family, but more people need to know the truth about where their money is going and how their everyday low savings is actually costing them.

1. CEO Mike Duke makes more money in one hour, than his employees earn in an entire year (Source). That thought alone makes me sick. Not only this, but the imbalance between the upper-level management versus hourly workers is horrendous, which brings me to my next point.

Source

2. Walmart has become the number one driver behind the growing use of food stamps in the United States (Source). In 2004, a study released the UC Berkeley Labor Center found that “reliance by Wal-Mart workers on public assistance programs in California comes at a cost to taxpayers of an estimated $86 million annually; this is comprised of $32 million in health related expenses and $54 million in other assistance.” (Source: Ken Jacobs and Arindrajit Dube, “Hidden Costs of Wal-Mart Jobs” [PDF file], UC Berkeley Labor Center, August 2, 2004. ) If that doesn’t mean something, read more about how it impacts your state and our country (IE-It Costs Taxpayers $1,557,000,000.00 to Support its Employees).

3. Wal-Mart currently faces lawsuits in thirty-one different States for wage and hour abuses potentially involving hundreds of thousand workers. For those lucky few that even get full-time status and benefits, they are still getting cheated.  For those already working less than 30 hours, their breaks and lunches are also going unpaid meaning even less income.

• In a recently certified class-action suit in Texas on behalf of more than 200,000 current and former Wal-Mart workers, statisticians estimate that the company underpaid its Texas workers by $150 million over four years by not paying them for the many times they worked during their daily 15-minute breaks. That $150 million estimate does not include other types of unpaid work. The statisticians, who analyzed time records from 12 Wal-Mart stores, found that the Texas employees averaged at least one hour of unpaid work each week from working through breaks (Source).

4. Wal-Mart discriminates against women and minorities. Do me a favor and do a quick search for “Walmart discrimination” and see how many pages and articles you find. After women being paid less than men (another conversation entirely), told that management “was a man’s job”, and skipped over for promotions, many lawsuits have been filed, including this one in Tennessee, this one in Florida, and this one in Arkansas.

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If you are still interested or want to know, I would recommend you watch the Wal-Mart movie or read all of the facts here. I would also recommend that you search for the effects of Wal-Mart on your state.  Sadly, there are too many marks against this retailer (like their lack of charitable donations, as in 1%, compared to their profit) for me to mention in one post, but luckily there are plenty of resources out there to find the facts. I hope I have struck a cord within you and helped your realize that although you may be saving a few dollars shopping at Wal-Mart, your money is still going to a company that discriminates, doesn’t value their employees, and manages to let their staff rely on government assistance because they don’t want to pay for benefits.

What are your thoughts on Wal-Mart?