Walmart

Have you ever heard anyone say what is Wal-Mart? No, or at least I have not. It is one of the most successful business’s world wide, and it continues to integrate itself into people’s lives everywhere. Everyone likes the low cost and convenience of the “One stop shop”. However, no one ever brings up the fact that Wal-Mart is having a detrimental effect to not only our economy, but to our communities within the U.S. and our brethren all across the globe

In every major city I have ever been to there is a Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has even manage to force there way into many smaller cities as well. Some of the problems with Wal-Mart range from putting smaller business’s out of business that cannot compete, to overworking their people, and putting a strain on our taxpayers. One might say that smaller business’s are just unlucky and that’s the way the cookie crumbles, but a lot of people who have that mind set might not know that Wal-Mart received a whopping 1,008,000,000 billion dollars worldwide in subsidies. Now can you say that small business’s have a fair chance? How many subsidies are given to them, how much money is given to them so they can open up shop in a certain town? Nothing is given to them. They do not receive money for coming to a town, they do not receive tax breaks or subsidies, the only thing they receive is unfair competition.

The next problem I would like to talk about causes a combination of other problems throughout our communities. I mentioned earlier that Wal-Mart overworks their people. This might seem fine, everyone works hard and if you overworked, you get overtime. Wrong, Wal-Mart is one of the worst about paying for overtime. Employees all over the U.S. are now in lawsuits because they were cheated. Moreover, Wal-Mart managers are taught how to cheat the employee out of overtime. Furthermore, with this cheating of employees out of their overtime and disallowance of it, they have more workers who are working “part-time” for low wages. As you know, part-time employees do not receive benefits. Well you might be inclined to think so what, but it is actually costing the consumer. Since these, so-called, part-time workers do not have benefits they rely heavily on government-funded programs for support. An estimated 1,557,000,000 billion dollars was spent from these organizations to help these part-time workers from Wal-Mart alone. They just cannot make it with out this support and that means higher taxes for the rest of us. They receive this support not out of laziness, but because of Wal-Mart’s scheme to have as few full-time workers as they can. The fewer number of full-time workers, the less benefits they have to pay, and the more profit they make. Listen to what one employee of Wal-Mart had to say about receiving government help; she commented that, “I would rather not need support because of all the trouble you have to go through to get it