I was at Best Buy on Monday and saw a dvd about Wal-Mart. I bought it and watched it. Some of the facts I remember:

The Walton family are five of the richest people in USA. They give less than 1% of their money to charity. Meanwhile, Bill Gates gives 58%.

Wal-Marts usually get tax subsidies when they come into a town. In the doc, they profiled a couple businesses that didn't get this. These companies went out of business.

Wal-Mart is racist and sexist. I knew this


I was wonering if anyone else saw and what was your opinion?

no, but would be interested. who made it?


EDIT: funny that you bought the DVD at best buy

The guy/company that produced it also made the Outfoxed dvd. His name was Robert Greenwald I think. I ordered that the other day. I normally don't shop at Best Buy. I think Best Buy did the same thing to music stores Wal-Mart did to mom and pop stores. I was there because my aunt asked me to drive her there.

saw it and now refuse to shop there


everyone should boycott

Saw a documentary on Wal Mart on Frontline.

They singlehandedly killed Rubbermaid as a company. Now it's just another brand name that some conglomerate bought the rights to.

To paraphrase Rob Gordon from High Fidelity, I didn't like Wal Mart then and I sure as fuck hate them now...

That's a great documentary also. When I first the dvd, my first thought was that it was that documentary. I believe that one's available online still.

You can order it from disinfo.com if you don't like Best Buy.

I actually order it from www.walmartmovie.com. I wish they had even more documentaries. On that site you can see trailers and parody trailers.

Mrs. A., some of you may already know, works at Wal-Mart. We watched the movie, and it confirmed everything we know already, and we learned about the Chinese worker problems, too.

They are bastards, but one has to earn a living where one can.
Don't worry about boycotting the store on Mrs. A's account.

If you can, could you share some personal experiences? I'm sure you have some good stories. I'm curious about how Wal-Mart works from an employee. Is the sexism and racism true? How about the working off the clock? Many questions.

I'll tell what I can, but I regret that my time is short today for story telling . I will be happy to report more tomorrow.

Just give Mrs. Morfee your password & let her talk for herself.

Well the work's not that hard
But the pay rates are low
Sales and rebates are high
Job promotions don't grow
Now just one of these days
I'll tell off all these toads
Then I, I won't work at Wal-Mart again

Why is the manager cold?
The one from soft-lines
I want to murder that broad
No respect. Made me cry
Just what is her deal?
I'm breaking out in hives
I, I won't work at Wal-Mart again

I can't get a good night's sleep
Open door is now closed
Happiness has gone south
My paid vacation's on hold
Job at Starbucks looks good
I can't take it no more!
'Cause I, I won't work at Wal-Mart again.

Copyright 2005, Agrimorfee



She doesn't have the access to a computer like I do, for various reasons.

Love that poem. Look forward to your commenta.

agrimorfee knows how to keep his bitches in line

it's hard out there for a pimp!

Ahh, this takes me back to my Mad Magazine days, reading song parodies and not knowing the tune their based on. Good stuff, Aggie, and dead-on. I worked at Wal-Mart for a year back in my freshman days, and you've pretty much nailed it. "Soft-lines", "Open door": all Wal-Mart lingo. If you could throw an "Action Alley" in there that would be cool too. Maybe if there's a sequel.

Boycotted the place before I saw it, but this made me even madder. Probably the one thing that has hurt America more than anthing else in the post-cold war world.

Unfortunately I will continue to shop there. We save over 30 percent on our grocery bill over the major supermarkets. Everything there is cheap and they have everything. I will continue to support the demon. Until a competetor has everything from groceries to oil changes and dvd players, i'll be shopping at walmart 24 hours a day.

Just do a little research and see why they are cheap. And its not their computerized invetory.

Yo, get the lady to unionize. Fuck up that shit from the inside, yo.

No need. They can be eating 3 year olds who don't work fast enough to make the products they sell and I would still go there. Nothing I can do, money is more important to me than ethics in this situation. Now if I made more than 28,500 a year I might think otherwise.

I make less then you and am raising 2 kids

No I don't think I'm a saint

but watching families that had their Harware and Grocery stores go out of business after 30 years plus all cuz of fucking wal-mart and the Wal Mart pricks be so smug about it I can't stomache going there

30% on a grocery bill is signifigant but I'd have to ask wtf are you buying?

we spend about 400 a month for a family of four - we could spend less but we treat the kids and buy special thing (both kids and lady have kidney problems)

we have wal mart here but not one with groceries but even if I could save 30% I'd look hard at my bill and see where I could trim w/o going to Wal Mart

My family has owned a print shop since 1973 and times are tough we face our own wal marts
all these 1 day banner chains - tshirt shops that damn near give their work away not to mention their use of imigrant workers who make peanuts - printers on the net that don't have to abide by the strict California laws regarding chemicals etc and places that don't have the huge workers comp that we have in Cali and now fucking Kinkos does banners

support the local guy as often as possible

And of course, we shop there, too. The 10% discount, just enough to cover the Chicagoland sales tax, is reason enough. Frankly, it's THE best place for DVDs. And if an item they have on sale isn't as good as the competitor, tear out the price from the competitor's flier, bring it in, politely talk to a manager about it, and they should better that price.



As the movie shows, if you say the word UNION in a Walmart store, shit happens. When union talk is overheard, a corporate team immediately gets flown in on a jet to that location to squelch that "problem". No lie.



I can't speak for the Super Wal-Mart, but don't go do your overall grocery shopping there. There's isn't much selection. However, for specific items one likes that that they do carry, the price can't be beat. Like Totino's Party Pizza, it's going for 94 cents. Where else in the world can you buy a whole pizza that 1-2 individuals can eat for $1.00?

I can't and won't give nitty gritty, but I can confirm many of those things. The Walmart at Touhy/Central is one of the biggest moneymakers in the region for the company, but it isn't the happiest.

Particularly telling is the reverse racism that we've noted from immigrant Bosnians working there. This has no reflection on the entire Bosnian population, but they all congregate there--cousins hire cousins, then they hire their friends. Many of them have little English skills, making customer communications difficult. They reward and promote their own and ignore other good workers. And some of those people are L-A-Z-Y.

Managers DO skim from the bonus pot that is meant for all workers when sales are up, but it's not illegal. More interesting is the managerial person who recently got caught embezzling thousands from the profits. I have also learned about an associate and a manager who were in a love tryst, then when it got sour the manager "accidentally" locked the associate in a trailer outside the store.

You can't even rely on your schedule to be consistent. "Somebody" arranges the bi-weekly schedule without regard to established requests for days-off (like if one is scheduled for a day-off on a Sunday, "someone" might schedule you on that day anyway, which calls for time to hassle the personnel dept. with the problem). This also goes in line with what the movie talked about in terms of the company trying to avoid overtime for its workers.

Getting workman's comp for on-the-job injuries there is like PULLING THE TEETH OFF AN ELEPHANT.

That's all for now.

We gotta turn this s**t around. This mindset is responsible for...well, almost everything that's wrong with this crazy rock we're livin' on. You name it--environmental degradation, white collar crime (heck, any collar crime), poverty, etc. My family is by no means rich (we don't make enough to save, at this point) but we're careful where we spend our money, and what kind of food we put on the table. I've heard the "cheaper groceries" arguement for Walmart before, and I have no doubt the food's cheaper. But what's in it? Is the food nutritious? I would imagine it's largely processed foods, refined grains, sugary foods and the like--the kind of stuff that leads to health problems down the road. With food, lately I feel you could pay a little more up front (buy whole grains, organic produce, etc.) or you could pay a little later on (failing health, medical bills, etc.)

I'm not gonna pile on to Walmart. Personally, I will never set foot in another one of their stores. I don't like what they're up to...it's too much. Their business practices might be okay for a small regional chain, but not when they're the biggest company in the history of mankind. In the interest of full disclosure we spend about $10 there annually, and it's all photos (one hour, X-mas cards, etc.). They're messing this country up something fierce though, seems to me. The few minutes my wife spends physically in the store near us (to pick up the aforementioned photos roughly twice a year) has, at times, a profoundly disturbing effect on her...well, lookie there...I guess I did pile on Walmart. Apologies to the agrimorfees.

No apologies needed. We rip on it whenever we can, believe me. Like I said earlier, don't stop boycotting the store on our account. That's the least likely way she will lose a job there.

No offense, but that store was a total dump the one time I went there. It was like being in a third world country.

I've read that Wal-Mart is able to sell certain items at such a low cost because they force the manufacturer/producer to cut corners in order to meet Wal-Mart's pricing demands, and that many companies produce an inferior version of their products that are sold only to Wal-Mart stores. Does the film adress this, and is there truth to this?

I don't remember the film stating that the companies produce inferior versions of their products, and I have no reason to believe that it's true. Of course, most of us know that Walmart forces certain music artists to release "clean" versions of their work.

I've heard about this in a couple of places. One was in Gourmet magazine. It was in regards to organic farmers/producers being forced to supply Wal-Mart stores with food goods that were only "organic" in name, because there was no way for them to sell foods that were truly organic to Wal-Mart at the prices that Wal-Mart was willing to pay.

I've also heard that Wrangler jeans makes jeans that exclusively are sold to Wal-Mart stores that are made from inferior materials. This is the one that I'm curious to see substantiated.

Of course, the Organic/non-Organic issue is a whole different ball of wax, across the board.

True, but this article was talking directly to what was happening in regards to Wal-Mart low balling farmers and ranchers, and how these guys had to compromise their production means to meet Wal-Mart's demands.

Here is an interesting article about Levi's and Wal-Mart:

How Levi's Got Its Jeans into Wal-Mart
CIO David Bergen joined Levi Strauss almost three years ago with a mission: Get ready for the number-one retailer. This summer will tell if his company's IT transformation will help turn around this American icon.
BY KIM GIRARD

IT'S NOON ON A Tuesday in late April, and the Levi Strauss in downtown San Francisco is nearly empty. There'd be echoes in the four-story flagship store on Post Street if not for the techno-jazz pounding on all floors. As smiling assistants fold T-shirts and straighten 501s, a cargo-style elevator creeps up and down the middle of the building. An old-fashioned sign, picturing a man in a cowboy hat and coveralls, reads "Levi's fits 'em all."

Maybe so. But these days, not enough customers are buying.

Once upon a time, Levi's and blue jeans were synonymous. James Dean looked oh so cool in them. Marilyn Monroe looked...real good. Almost since its founding 150 years ago, the company has been an American icon. But tastes change. For a time, nothing could come between teenage girls and their Calvins. Twentysomethings started going to malls and haunting The Gap. And by the mid-1990s, Levi's had missed the baggy pant craze that overtook American high schools. In 1996, Levi's sales peaked at $7.1 billion. Last year, they fell to $4.1 billion, a six-year low. The competition has nibbled away at Levi's jeans market share, which has tumbled to about 12 percent from 18.7 percent in 1997.

CIO David Bergen says Levi's is being squeezed between the high and the low ends of the jeans market. To escape "the jaws of death," as Bergen calls them, Levi's will have to begin selling to mass channel retailers such as Wal-Mart. And that means transforming the company's IT.
Since the peak, Levi's, which also makes casual Dockers and higher-end Slates clothing lines, has seen its customer base pulled apart. On the high end of the market, fickle fashionistas are eschewing Levi's in favor of boutique brands such as Blue Cult, Juicy and Seven. On the low end, moms are buying Lee and Wrangler for their kids because they're affordable (on average $10 less than Levi's Red Tab) and because they find these brands at the superstores they prefer: BJ's, Sam's Club, Target, T.J. Maxx and so on.

David Bergen, Levi's senior vice president and CIO, says his company is caught in the "jaws of death." "We're getting squeezed," he says in his office in Levi's Plaza, which has a startling view of San Francisco Bay and is about a 30-minute walk away from the Post Street store. But Levi's thinks it may have found a way to cheat a retail demise.


Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, is where moms go to stock up on Max and Maddy's school supplies, their juice boxes and, of course, their jeans. So if you want the kids, and the rest of their families, you need to sell at Wal-Mart.

And you need a new product for this new customer. This month, Levi's is introducing its new, less expensive Signature jeans line. (The jeans, for men, women and children, sell for around $23. They have fewer detail finishes than Levi's other lines. They don't have the company's trademark red tab or stitching on the pocket.) Of course, there's something in it for Wal-Mart. The company, already the largest clothing retailer in the world, wants more affluent customers. To lure them in, it needs big brands. Acknowledging that the company's customers come from a "cross-section of income levels and lifestyles," Wal-Mart Senior Vice President Lois Mikita says the company "continues to tailor its selection to meet the needs of those customers."

Levi's believes the new line, and the new retail venue, will revitalize the company by boosting annual sales by hundreds of millions. With up to 100 million shoppers trolling through Wal-Mart every week, that's not an unreasonable assumption. "Levi has to face reality," says Ira Kalish, a retail industry economist. "This is a company that's dropped in size 40 percent or so over the past couple of years. The move to Wal-Mart could be sizable." By partnering with Wal-Mart, adds Harry Bernard, an executive at retail consultancy Colton Bernard, "they'll get the volume they'll need to survive."

If it works.

And, to a large extent, the success of Levi's strategy depends on the performance of its technology—and its CIO.


The Mass Market Changes Everything
Levi's decision last November to begin doing business with Wal-Mart changed CIO Bergen's life.

Like every supplier stocking the $245 billion retailer's endless shelves, Bergen had to rethink his supply chain—every detail of how Levi's jeans, jackets and shirts would get from factories to new regional warehouses to Wal-Mart's 3,422 U.S. stores when they are needed, not before and certainly not after. That's a mighty leap from the demands placed on Levi's by smaller department store chains such as Macy's (243 stores), or even J.C. Penney (1,049 stores).

Complicating this challenge was the fact that Bergen would be going live with a completely upgraded supply chain system during the back-to-school rush, the worst time for a retailer to roll out a new technology.

But 47-year-old Bergen says he signed on at Levi's in November 2000 for precisely these kinds of challenges. He's sought them out all through his career. In 1981, he helped install The Gap's first point-of-sale system, which tracked both sales and inventory. In 1985, he moved to clothing maker Esprit de Corps, where he managed all IT development before heading back to The Gap to help improve production planning.

When Levi's new President and CEO Philip A. Marineau called in 2000, Bergen was at Carstation.com, a startup with a business model he questioned. He was itching to return to the apparel business. "One of the things that excited me was the changes Levi's was going through," says Bergen, who bears a slight resemblance to the actor Tim Allen and, like most employees milling around Levi's Plaza, dresses in the company's casual clothes. Marineau came to Levi's from PepsiCo in 1999, a year after helping the eternal number-two beverage maker surpass Coke in sales. Shortly after his arrival, he planned a turnaround that would entail making clothes that better met demands of stores and customers—selling to the mass market and tightening operations around the world.

Bergen wanted in. He knew that Marineau's plan to change the line according to what customers wanted would demand big things. More slicing and dicing of customer data and investments in data warehouse technology. He knew that selling to the mass market would require supply chain improvements. He understood that globalization demanded standardized enterprise systems. What more could a CIO want?

After settling into his new job in 2000, he began working to make Levi's technology fit for what the retail world calls the "mass channel," big discount stores where 31 percent of all jeans in the country are now sold. Levi's wanted to play in that channel, and when Bergen arrived, the company was in tentative discussions with Kmart, Target and Wal-Mart, among others. But the water in the channel flowed swiftly; Bergen knew that without a technology overhaul, Levi's would surely drown. He was most concerned that the company's national distribution strategy didn't suit the way Wal-Mart did business. Levi's had a poor on-time delivery record too—the result of manufacturing and logistics problems born when it shuttered company-owned factories in the United States during the late 1990s and transitioned largely to overseas manufacturing.


Making Levi's Wal-Mart Ready
But all of this change took time.

When Levi's and Wal-Mart first sat down to talk, Levi's was not—as Gregg Hammann, Levi's U.S. chief customer officer, recalls—up to the demands that Wal-Mart placed on its 30,000 suppliers.

Gregg Hammann, Levi's U.S. chief customer officer, says recent IT improvements have enabled the apparel maker to deliver products on time, 95 percent of the time. Before CIO David Bergen arrived, the rate was 65 percent.
"Our supply chain could not deliver the services Wal-Mart expected," says Bergen, who spent time at Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Ark., headquarters during "exploratory meetings" before a deal was signed. Being a supplier to Wal-Mart demands a certain level of performance—and cost control. Wal-Mart drives you to work with your supply chain to put the same requirements on your suppliers that Wal-Mart puts on you. If you can't make your supply chain work, you won't benefit from being a supplier. Period.

At Levi's, executives couldn't track where its product was moving in the pipeline—how many pairs of jeans were being manufactured in which factories and how many were sitting in trucks or in distribution centers.

This wouldn't fly with Wal-Mart, a supply chain pioneer that moves products off its shelves faster than any retailer and expects replenishment on time to keep costs down. Levi's needed to both get a handle on how its products were doing in stores and accelerate the speed at which those products moved from import dock to warehouse to retail shelf.

The lack of information available to Levi's executives translated into poor performance even without Wal-Mart. "Before David, we delivered 65 percent of our product on time to customers," Hammann says. Industry gurus call that a poor performance. "Our rate today is 95 percent," Hammann says. That's a healthy bump that could improve sales by 10 percent to 15 percent, according to Marshal Cohen, senior industry analyst of NPD Group's Fashionworld, an apparel and footwear market researcher. Hammann credits improved demand replenishment systems and forecasting technology the company now uses. Additions include a so-called dashboard Bergen developed that sits on executives' desktops and shows how Levi's 501 jeans are doing with, say, Kohl's department stores on a weekly, monthly or annual basis. The dashboard is designed to look like a website and allows executives to click on a specific product to track how it moves from the factory to the distribution centers to the stores. It shows how many pairs of jeans are available at a given time, what the demand is from the stores and whether the company is meeting that demand. "When I first got here I didn't see anything," Hammann says. "Now I can drill down to the product level."

This system, unlike the old one, connects the employees working within the supply chain to the salespeople all the way up to the company's financial office, a change Bergen oversaw. Execs use the dashboard to track trends—such as whether denim shorts are a hot item in a particular geographic area—and to prevent problems. For example, during the third quarter of 2002, when the company started shipping Dockers Stain Defender pants, it expected to sell about 2 million pairs. The dashboard, however, alerted Levi's to that fact that the pants were flying off the shelves and another 500,000 more would be needed to meet demand. Having that information at its fingertips helped the company avoid bungling its inventory, plan in advance and sell more pants, Hammann says. That same sort of information will be crucial to helping replenish Wal-Mart's shelves during the back-to-school season.


Supply Chain Transformation
Bergen says the most challenging part of the technology overhaul was changing from a national distribution system to a regional one. Before, all Levi Strauss 501-style jeans, for example, arrived at stores from four distribution centers in Kentucky, Mississippi, Nevada and Arkansas. This wasn't good enough to meet Wal-Mart's demands for rapid-fire replenishment.

So Levi's has added three "pool points" (in California, Texas and Florida) to distribute in-bound freight to either Wal-Mart stores or to the distribution centers. In addition, Levi's will ship products for each new season in full carton "prepacks" from its distribution centers to Wal-Mart's distribution centers. The pool points will replenish this supply, working by region to send stacks of jeans to Wal-Mart's distribution network.

As part of this network of facilities, Levi's also developed a scanning tool for its manufacturers to check the accuracy of cartons ready to ship. The company implemented AS2 technology to exchange with Wal-Mart EDI transactions that support collaborative forecasting. And a set of Manugistics applications allow the company to collaborate on demand forecasting, product modifications and orders planning with Wal-Mart. All of those changes mean Levi's can plan, define and ship prepackaged orders to the retailer. Bergen says testing of the new system went well and the company was on schedule for a June delivery as of press time.

To support the Wal-Mart initiative, Bergen helped put together a cross-functional team of employees from IT, finance and sales who helped with planning. That included supporting everything from ordering to logistics to making improvements to the data warehouse. The company also upgraded its networks and its U.S.-based applications, and it is testing to see whether its systems will scale to handle orders from all of Wal-Mart's 3,200 stores.

Next Up: A Global ERP Rollout
Levi's bucks the trend by starting SAP now

Read More

"The changes to support Wal-Mart are extensive," Bergen says. Eventually, about half of the upgrades required to do business with Wal-Mart in the United States will be replaced by the new SAP system the company will install during the next five years (see "Next Up: A Global ERP Rollout," right).

Simon Spence, a senior consultant at Perot Systems who works with clients preparing to do business with Wal-Mart, says businesses benefit technologically from the demands Wal-Mart puts on them as their biggest customer. "Wal-Mart is a great catalyst for them to invest more money than they would previously to stay in business," he says. "That's the way you grow. That's the way you survive. It drives you to work toward becoming a global company."


The First Signs of Turnaround
It wasn't until Levi's had a better window into its business that it was confident enough to do business with Wal-Mart. In May 2002, Hammann and Bergen sat down with a 25-person team for a daylong meeting in San Francisco. "We asked, Is this something we can do?" says Hammann. The team, composed of managers from all parts of Levi's business, had covered its bases on the project, Bergen says, considering all "people changes, process changes and technology changes."

By September 2002, the group decided to go forward. Hammann is confident. "We went from a company that couldn't shoot straight to where we're very capable of ready, aim, fire," he says.

Wal-Mart's Mikita says she is impressed with the level of detail Levi's "has dug into to make the execution of this new launch 100 percent."

And today, there are encouraging signs Levi's is turning around. Sales for the company's third and fourth quarters grew for the first time since 1996. During the spring and fall of 2002, Levi's started popping up on NPD Fashionworld's top 10 list of brands preferred by young women for the first time in recent memory. "It hadn't been close to that for a while," says Cohen. "Teens hadn't gravitated toward Levi's in years. That was incredible. A lot of that has to do with having the right style in the right place at the right time." Cohen says Levi's plans to upgrade its business processes, and its improved replenishment system has helped the company get the right sizes to the right stores. The question is, Will they be able to sustain it?

"The jury is still out as to whether this structure is going to work," says retail consultant Bernard. Levi's might think it can fool customers into thinking the jeans on a Wal-Mart rack are "real" Levi's, but he's not so sure customers will understand the $24.99 versus $50 price difference between the pair at Wal-Mart and the pair at Macy's. And if the jeans aren't selling well at Macy's, what makes Levi's so sure it can sell jeans at Wal-Mart?

Others say it's tough for any supplier to turn a Wal-Mart relationship into a gold mine. "Wal-Mart works with What Wal-Mart Wants
Three characteristics Wal-Mart looks for in a supplier, and has found in Rubbermaid, Hershey Foods and The Stanley Works

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their vendors to make sure [Wal-Mart] succeeds," and that's not a guarantee that the vendors make a lot of money, says Paula Rosenblum, a retail analyst at AMR Research. Indeed, a recent Bain survey of more than 20 Wal-Mart suppliers found that very few were doing everything right to gain on both the top and bottom lines (see "What Wal-Mart Wants," right). "The place where companies do fail is when they aren't bringing anything new to Wal-Mart," says Gib Carey, a supply chain analyst at Bain, who studies the company's supplier relationships. "Wal-Mart is constantly looking at 'How can I get the same product I am selling today at a lower price somewhere else?'"

Nonetheless, Levi's was due to start shipping the Signature line to Wal-Mart at the end of May, beginning with 40 stores. By June, Levi's will be ferrying the new clothes to all U.S. Wal-Mart stores in preparation for the back-to-school rush. Bergen expects some bumps during the first three months. But if all goes well, the company plans to sign new deals with other discount retailers too.

"If I look overconfident, I'm not," he says. "I'm very nervous about this change." That's understandable, considering the unchartered waters. "When we trip, we have to stand up real quick and get back on the horse, as they say."

Preferably wearing a pair of Levi's.

My godfather/uncle runs the Del Monte plant on Mendota IL, the main employer there in the area.

Here's the way WalMart does it. They set up a HUGE contract between the supplier (in this case Del Monte) and the entire chain of WalMart stores. This contract is so large that if Del Monte does not bend to each and every whim of WalMart they threaten to kill the entire contract, thereby causing catastrophic losses for Del Monte. I believe 20 to 25% of DelMonte's total business is with Wal Mart. Because WalMart knows this, they drive the bulk contract price down so low that it is barely profitable for Del Monte. Also, this is for sure factual, Wal Mart has refused and sent back ENTIRE TRUCKS because of ONE rusted can of corn. They do not do business with their suppliers, they essentially enslave them.

I've been preaching against Wal-Mart for years. The Vlasic pickle story and the Levi story are fairly well known. One wonders if their goal isn't to drive everyone else out of business, and make us all buy Sam's brands of merchandise.

I go there as little as humanly possible. I'm a quality over price guy, and I believe that you usually get what you pay for.

And my company supplies storage containers to Wal-Marts in Indiana for the holidays. Supposedly they're a national account of ours, but they use whoever the heck they feel like at the moment. When our corporate people explained they were bound by contract to use us, their reply was "Fine. Then we won't use you at all. If you want to fight it, we can go to court."

Just out of curiosity, what's everyone's take on the big box non Wal-Mart stores? (i.e., Target, K-Mart, etc)

I eschew all stores, unless you call a Mexican dude w/ a wooden truckbed at Kilbourn and Madison selling watermelons and rugs a store. I will only buy used crap from people on Craigslist.

When I worked at Wal-Mart they made me wear black jeans every day.

That combined with their sleezeball politics have led me to boycott.

"Check these out! Yeah, black jeans are cool I'll have you know!"

I hear Target treats its people fairly the same. But I like how Target aims a little higher in stylishness (and I emphasize A LITTLE). The food mart at the bigger ones offer an amazing selection of frozen items that would be good to stock for a big party.

Another shitty thing about Wal-Mart is how they are trying to cop the Target flashy advertising style (indie pop tunes, pretty colors, youthful models) in recent commercials...to fool you into thinking they are hip.

I have been paying attention to wal-mart for a while because of my dad and staying interested in the stocks of the company. Wal-Mart actually has a test store out in Texas where they are selling more "designer" brands, include sushi bars and Wi-Fi hot spots in the store's resturant and coffee shops. they are also selling wines and what not and the workers and uniforms are different. I'm anxious to see if the treatment of workers in these "upper-class" wal-marts change and if this stratagy can wipe out bigger self made buisnesses.

(they are even selling real diamond rings and 500 dollar bottles of wine.)

I am currently in Indiana PA and the only place to shop around here is wal-mart and an extremly small Giant-Eagle (groccery store) I will stop into wal-mart for sodas and red bull but I usually try to avoid it and Sam's Club except for the same products. (red bull is insainly priced even in bulk)

I'm okay with target. I got my bath mat there.

I only buy things that are 100% hand-made by American craftsmen/women.

What about the FRENCH BREAD you had at lunch?

That was Freedom Bread, homie.

It really is pointless though, you realize that right? Even if you got 10,000 more people to stop shopping there forever it won't matter. They have the best prices and everything under the sun so they win. Millions and millions of consumers aren't going to boycott. Even many of us educated ones are saying we hate their ethics but it boils down to the dollar and we still shop there. Until I make more money or the effects of the current administration fade away and the middle class can strive again, then we are handcuffed. It's like the war on terror. No one is going to stop buying gas forever and a one day gas strike does absolutley nothing and sends no message. We are stuck, we keep buying our SUV's and making the middle east rich and supporting terror. We know it's wrong but we continue to do it.

Worst logic ever. "they're going to win, so why bother?"

Because it's the right thing to do? Because this type of attitude is exactly why no one has any pride left in our country?

Koko in WWII: "Hitler is going to win anyway, so why resist him?"

Agreed. "So this car seat I just bought is dyed red from the bloody hands of child laborers who work 16 hours a day for a nickel in Nepal? Well, fuck it, it's $1.00 cheaper than the one made in America, and I ONLY make $28,000 a year."

You have very few things, then.

Here's a link to an archived radio program that I found pretty interesting. It's a Minnesota Public Radio interview with Charles Fishman from a month or so back. The guest is Charles Fishman, author of "The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - And How It's Transforming the American Economy". If you have about an hour, this interview is worth your time. Just click on the "Listen to call-in show audio" link on the site that (hopefully) comes up.

And yeah, I'd like to see how Biggie's furnishing his new place solely with goods hand crafted by American craftsmen/women. We did used to produce stuff in this country, and I really think we need to start doing so again. It ain't all about cheap prices...it can't be.

EDIT: that link I posted seems to not be the best download for this program (but it may be the only one). I'm actually relistening to it right now and it seems to be a re-broadcast that was aired while MPR was doing their pledge drive (lots of "we need you to call...yadda yadda). Too bad. That pledge drive stuff is annoying enough (I am a member of MPR) when it's actually happening, but to have to deal with it in an archived clip...ugh. I've dug around their site a bit, but this seems to be the only link. Around the 10:15 mark beware...you'll be asked to go back in time and donate to MPR. This being said, it still might be worth your while.

exactlly

keep buying walmart shit and maybe not your children

but your grandchildren will have little to no job opp.

when all we do here is buy and not produce anything we will all be screwed