Personal Liberty Digest
by John Myers

Why I Hate Walmart

I doubt any of the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court has ever shopped at a Walmart. That probably helped the retail giant when the Court dismissed the largest employment discrimination case in U.S. history last month. But the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case brought by 1.5 million female employees hardly makes Walmart a paragon of good business.

The best prices in town really only add up to big profits for Walmart shareholders. Annual sales total more than $300 billion per year. In 20 years, the price of Walmart stock (NYSE:WMT) has risen almost tenfold. But Sam Walton’s Frankenstein has killed off countless small businesses and destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Based on revenues, Walmart is the largest company on the Fortune 500. The company employs 2.1 million workers worldwide — 25 times more than Exxon/Mobil. Roughly 90 percent of Americans live within 15 miles of a Walmart.

Walmart’s 4,424 stores in America are supplied by 10 million 40-foot containers that cross the Pacific each year from Singapore, Shanghai and Shenzhen, China, to the Long Beach/Los Angeles port. It is estimated that Americans spend $36 million at Walmart every hour of every day, almost all of it on cheaply produced goods made in Asia.

But this fact flabbergasted me most: Walmart imports more goods from China than the total imports from the U.K. or Russia. That makes Walmart a huge contributor to America’s trade deficit, an imbalance that is eroding America’s economic prospects.

In the book The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business, Nelson Lichtenstein writes: “(Wal-Mart has created an) imagined community where economic and moral lives are interconnected and virtuous. The fact that Wal-Mart itself contributed to the conditions that lead to so much social and familial instability may be irrelevant to those who shop and work there. Indeed, the low pay, high turnover, awkward shifts, and general precariousness that have become the norm.â€