Wal-Mart Essay
By: ChessieKitty • Essay • 570 Words • April 9, 2015 • 914 Views
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Wal-Mart Essay
- Do you think Wal-Mart is doing enough to become more sustainable?
- No, the first reason is that the employees still feel like they are being mistreated with it being hours or schedule for a day off and never getting it. Need to focus on the product, environment, and staff.
- What are the problems that Wal-Mart has faced, and what has the company done to address them?
- The power usage- they are talking about going “green” by putting solar or wind energy into most facilities. Dim lights when its mid-day and it is the sunniest and use the skylights for light and zone the heating and cooling in parts of the Wal-Mart’s.
- Employee Unions- One insistent where Texas butchers wanted to join United Food Workers Union and got rid of the meat cutting department. Wal-Mart announced that in china they would not renew the contracts of unionized workers than later that year they had to sign a memorandum with the ACFTU allowing unions in stores.
- Discrimination- Woman in manager position got paid less than men did. It was taken to court but a class-action lawsuit was not allowed but the women were allowed to sue Wal-Mart by themselves. In 2009 Wal-Mart paid $17.5 million to settle a class action lawsuit on behave of truck drivers. Another incident is where a customer made a racist comment over the loud speaker, he was later arrested and promised to have the intercom fixed.
- Immigrants- Under paying immigrants that were on the cleaning crew and stated keeping them in involuntary servitude. This was dismissed due to lack of evidence.
- CEO fraud- Plead guilty for 27 months of home confinement, $440,000 in fines and 1,500 hours of community service.
- Environmental (urban sprawl) - This is where Wal-Mart stress’s the city’s infrastructure of roads, parking and traffic flow. To help this not damage it so much to build smaller stores that are 15,000 square feet unlike the thirty acres it takes to build a normal size Wal-Mart. The abandoned stores do not get touched and 26 million square feet of land it not being used.
- Why has Wal-Mart tended to improve performance while other retail outlets have been suffering financially?
- Since Wal-Mart has guaranteed with the lowest prices it might make other companies either lower their wages or take a loss from what they are selling. In our area we have Wal-Mart, Kmart and Food City. Kmart competes over the clothes being the lowest and Food City with the food cost being lower. Food City does offer a card to get bonus point likes for gas and make food a little cheaper. Before that Kmart was about to get ran out of business and Wal-Mart was going to become a monopoly. When you set things so low and continues to go lower when people see the price difference it causes them to either lower their price and take a financial hit, or risk it not being sold at all. With high name brand clothes from Peebles or Show Shoe if you can get the same look at lower price at Wal-Mart then why not do it. The lower prices on food and clothes is what is hurting retail outlets because the low prices they can not afford.