Watched it. It had some good points. Too bad no one realizes the same thing goes on at Target and K-Mart too.

I dated a girl who went from Wal-Mart to Target. They treated her worse, and she's now out of retail all together.

i think a huge problem is that america has lost it's
manufacturing base.

almost nothing is manufactured here anymore. We cant even manufacture a hairdryer !!!! I look around my place and everything, and i don mean everything, is foreign.

It seems a lot of people don't like the fact that Walmart sells mostly items made in China.. What about the other things Walmart does.. such as not making it possible for most of it's employees to get health insurance so they are on government assistance for it? plus the average Walmart employee makes $13k a year.. Could they afford it anway? A class action lawsuit by 69,000 employees that were forced to work off the clock without pay...Deleting time from employees time cards.. Class action lawsuits for discrimination against women.. federal allegations it used illegal immigrants to clean its stores.. Right now there is 26,699,678 square feet of empty Walmarts wasting space in the US... Walmart imported $18billion from China in 2004..

Maruchan Ramen noodles are made in the USA.

Where do you get your info? In Kansas the average Wal-mart associate starts at about $7 an hour. 40 hour week, so that's about $280 a week before taxes. 52 weeks a year, so that's 14560. That's starting. Before taxes, granted, but there's also associates that have been there 10 plus years making 16 to 20 plus an hour. If you want more money make planes or cars. There's not enough margin in retail.

On health insurance, I work for Wal-Mart (as if you haven't guessed yet) and I have a Health savings account through the company that I pay 8 dollars a paycheck to have maintained, I put an additional $40 that the company matches. It goes into an account that earns interest that I can use to pay medical expenses. Once I've paid the deductible with that, the plan pays up to 80% of the other expenses. It's worked pretty good for me. I don't have kids though, so that might change the math a bit.

You do realize that some of those lawsuits are decades old now? Doesn't mean that they didn't happen, but it could mean that there are policies in place to make sure that it doesn't happen any more often than it does in the local grocery store, or Denny's, or Burger King?


I get a little bitter when everyone is happy to bash the place I work because it makes a good target. How many of you have studied sociology or economics? What do you think of it?

just by chance I happened to go to Target yesterday. I swear
I do not work at Target.

I checked the food prices, which is pretty much the only thing i buy, and they were comparable.

the only thing missing was the dirt, masses of people, and workers who couldnt speak english.

i go to a "high end" store to purchase meat & chicken, i will not eat the pre-packaged stuff from the discount-boxes. but from now on iam going to Target.

just find something else besides wal-mart - the place is bad.

Have you ever worked for one of those small stores or shopped in them? Especially in smaller towns that can't support a Wal-Mart by themselves? The small store has to pay more to have the product shipped to them, therefore there is less profit. Less profit, means they have to pay lower wages compared to the Wal-Mart (Or Target, Or Kroger-brand Grocery store, etc.). When the store owner can go to Wal-Mart and buy it off the shelf for less than he can get from the distributor, it may be time to admit that the small store isn't viable any more.

good thing too, I eat a lot of those, you can actually get pretty creative with them, add stuff to em and all.

for the most part you are correct on walmart carrying foreign made goods....but they also carry American Made products. We would be boycotting Walmart for some of our very own goods if we avoided them altogether.

Cut-n-paste:

Abandons Buy American Program. In February 1985, Walton wrote 3,000 American manufacturers and wholesalers to announce that the chain wanted to buy more American goods. Walton said: “We cannot continue to be a solvent nation as long as we pursue this current accelerating direction. Our company is firmly committed to the philosophy by buying everything possible from suppliers who manufacture their products in the United States.” Today, however, over 80 percent of Wal-Mart’s 6,000 global suppliers are based in China. [Wal-Mart Press Release, 3/13/85; Wal-Mart Literature, 1994; PBS Frontline, 11/16/04]

There is no way I believe someone working at walmart that isn't a manager or anything is making that much money..
The median pay for a walmart employee being there 10-19 years is $14

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Walmart.com/Hourly_Rate

Here is a way we can for certain not help anyone do anything bad, go be a hermit in the wilderness!

That's probably not a bad idea.

Don't shop Wal-Mart.

You can buy lotsa cheap $hit from China or a few quality things from elsewhere. You can do without so much stuff too...really you can.

Personal responsibility...Wal-Mart isn't killing us we are.

Mr. Walton started something great in my city. He paid most of it too.

Our city schools lost their accreditation.

Walton made a financial scholarship program for the low income city children. It's pays $1,500 a year per child to attend a school of their choice. It covers kindergarten through 8th grade.

I think it was offered to 100 children in a lottery. Thousands applied for it.

This also helped the private schools that were losing attendance. The kids are getting a better education.