America Against Wal-Mart

Today, Wal-Mart is a well-known, American convenience store with over 657 locations throughout the country. It specializes in discount prices, in order, to keep its customers interested and engaged in its products. However, Wal-Mart occasionally gets a bad reputation for its fight to keep prices low. PBS’s daytime special regarding Wal-Mart changed my opinion of the discount retailer, but I do not know how long I can resist the store. One surprising thing I learned throughout the film was that may people are against Wal-Mart and their business tactics like Rubbermaid, a company dedicated to providing affordable, reusable products for customers. When resources increased to make Rubbermaid products Wal-Mart refused to increase the price of Rubbermaid products in their stores, Wal-Mart’s stubbornness eventually led to Rubbermaid sinking and being dropped from Wal-Mart shelves. That surprised me the most because it showed that Wal-Mart is only for themselves and not their providers. Even though, I think Wal-Mart is successful I don’t think this strategy of dropping providers for price increases in necessarily fair, they as a nationwide store should be willing to help their fellow companies especially if they are not directly competing with each other.
Wal-Mart is not only hurting American companies, but the American people, as well. Wal-Mart is beginning to outsource more with other countries like China due to cheaper manufacturing costs, but that outsourcing hurts the American people and increase unemployment, which the state pays for. The American people will lose jobs because their factories will be closed due to the drift to China, but outsourcing does help the Chinese population. But as Americans we need to help our people earn jobs and not foreign dealers.
Many people believe Wal-Mart’s ‘price policy’ is beneficial to the consumers, but it is not entirely. The price policy is most beneficial to Wal-Mart because they are buying products for as low as the can and then hiking up the price for consumers. Wal-Mart also uses an ‘opening price’ tactics, which is advertising a low price item at the beginning of a specific department to lure people into that area. Consumers will believe that all prices in that department are as low as they can be, but in actuality that is not true at all. Therefore, they are tricking their customers into their prices, which I do not think is ethical as a respectable corporation.
The FRONTLINE video regarding Wal-Mart has changed my opinion on the store slightly, but it has not affected me enough to not shop there. The truth is Wal-Mart is too convenient to pass up. Wal-Mart has benefitting numerous customers by the amounts of products they have, it makes shopping for any type of consumer extremely easy. However, a lot of American companies have not benefitted from Wal-Mart due to outsourcing. In class, we discussed how outsourcing hurts the American population, but if you want to survive and expand your company it is the right tactic. Therefore, I think Wal-Mart should continue to outsource if they want to keep expanding because the truth is that American products are simply too expensive. If they continue to outsource not only will it provide low prices for consumers, but high profit for shareholders. Except Wal-Mart does need to learn how to balance those two with increased worker benefits. Wal-Mart employees do not earn enough benefits for the rate they are working and the rate at which Wal-Mart is expanding, therefore, I believe from each certain profit they reach as a company Wal-Mart should give to their employees as bonuses.