Wal Mart And Other Big Box Retailers example essay topic

This Wal-Mart represents the sickness of capitalism at its almost fully evolved state. As Jim Hightower said, 'Why single out Wal-Mart? Because it's a hog. Despite the homespun image it cultivates in its ads, it operates with an arrogance and avarice that would make Enron blush and John D. Rockefeller envious. It's the world's biggest retail corporation and America's largest private employer; Sam Robson Walton, a member of the ruling family, is one of the richest people on earth. Wal-Mart and the Waltons got to the top the old-fashioned way: by roughing people up.

Their low, low prices are the product of two ruthless commandments: Extract the last penny possible from human toil and squeeze the last dime from its thousands of suppliers, who are left with no profit margin unless they adopt the Wal-Mart model of using nonunion labor and shipping production to low-wage hellholes abroad. ' (The Nation, March 4th 2002 web). Wal-Mart products are not less expensive due to virtuosity. The 'misguided hippie punk's e ems to labor under the delusion that Wal-Mart and other big box retailers are somehow the savior of middle and lower class Americans.

The low priced products are produced in foreign countries under horrible working conditions and are sold by workers at Wal-Mart stores that are paid poverty wages. For more info go to the National Labour Committee website and read up on Wal-Mart (web and United Students Against Sweatshops web). Working conditions in Wal-Mart are utterly miserable. Please read Barbara Ehrenreich's recent book, Nickel and Died.

In her brilliant book she reveals the misery of working for a big box retailer and the impossibility of living in America on poverty wages. She spent time working at Wal-Mart in St. Paul, Minnesota and struggled to survive. Read her account of the anti-union propaganda that Wal-Mart espouses. Wal-Mart is no friend to the working poor.

Wal-Mart and other big box retailers are destroying the cultural landscape of America. As Ehrenreich states 'wherever you look there is no alternative to the mega scale corporate order, from which every form of local creativity and initiative has been abolished by distant home offices. ' Wal-Mart is a key player in the cultural homogenization of America. It is impossible to 'think outside of the big box. ' Everywhere you go in America you find KFC, Home Depot, Best Buy, Circuit City, Burger King, etc... People are fighting Wal-Mart and are winning.

For more info go to: web misguided young man who wrote the pro-Wal-Mart editorial needs to ask himself if he really needs most of the products that Wal-Mart sells. Are they really necessary for survival? Probably not. We must break the chains of corporate domination that are strangling American democracy and spreading misery across the world. We must break our addiction to senseless consumption that Wal-Mart and other retailers thrive on.

We must resist corporate globalization. We must defuse the power of these mega corporations, these private tyrannies... these artificial entities that have been graced with the legal rights of man. Another world is possible- web.