On Friday, readers of this paper were treated to \Standing Up for Wal-Mart."" Nic Lehmann-Ziebarth's editorial had the unambiguous goal of standing up for Wal-Mart in the face of that lynch mob of liberals who hate our nation's most impressive chain of superstores, their practices, and that annoying smiley face who keeps rolling back prices.
Lehmann-Ziebarth argues, for the most part, that there is no more reason to dislike a corporation than to dislike a local mom-and-pop store. And actually, there is not. The kids like Miller Lite, a top selling product, and no one is shouting for its end. Some big corporations, like Timberland and Ben & Jerry's, use their bigness for the good of the world. The bootmaker pays its employees for community service hours; the ice cream moguls try to save the rainforest. Speaking on behalf of overweight opinion writers everywhere, bigness is not a good reason to hate something.
But there is a difference between just being big, and throwing your immense weight around. Wal-Mart is a special corporation. People hate Wal-Mart for its own code of conduct, and not just because its prices are so low that a mom-and-pop cannot compete, or that Wal-Mart is anti-union or that a member of the community does not own it. The reasons listed in the article only bring our hatred to disgust.
When Wal-Mart is cheaper than cheap, it comes at a great cost to American business. Wal-Mart is the world's largest retailer, a store that a company like Master Lock has to do business with in order to survive. In an interview with Fast Company Magazine, former Master Lock CEO Randall Lariemore explained how Wal-Mart used this to shape his company's future. Wal-Mart demanded that Master Lock sell them their product at the drastically reduced rate of lower quality Asian brands of locks. In order to keep prices in line, in January 1997, Master Lock was forced to stop using Milwaukee as their manufacturing center. Eight-hundred jobs went to Mexico. Companies like Levi's and Vlasic, both famous for high-quality goods, have had to abandon their most valuable asset, the perceived value and increase in quality of their brand name. Both have been forced by Wal-Mart to sell the superstore their products at a reduced price. For Levi's this meant creating a lower quality line of clothing, for Vlasic it meant selling pickles at a rate low enough to dissuade consumers that the name warrants an increase in price. The consumers who benefit from the fabled ""rollbacks"" in price may very well be the employees of companies Wal-Mart actively screws.
But it is not just other company's employees Wal-Mart harms, and not just this country's citizens. Wal-Mart's treatment of employees is despicable. To correct a myth perpetuated by Lehmann-Ziebarth's article, Wal-Mart's employees are not transient, many are people who need consistent work, who need to supplement social security, who need two jobs to hold down rent. Wal-Mart was recently exposed as locking evening work staff into the store, often times leaving no employee a key. The largest sexual discrimination suit in the history of California was filed against Wal-Mart, as was a suit alleging that workers were forced into overtime hours without overtime pay. When a recent sting operation found 250 illegal immigrants working as night janitors, the government announced that recorded conversations showed executives had knowledge of their immigration status. Wal-Mart's inventory may reflect the latest styles, but their employment practices date to the Byzantine era.
More so than other corporations, more so than other superstores, Wal-Mart is not just a big corporation but a big mean one. With its undermining outside businesses, and undermining its own employees, the cost of Wal-Mart is not worth its low prices.
