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I can hope, anyhow. Because they don’t seem to be punished in this life. Wal-Mart Memo Suggests Ways […]

I can hope, anyhow. Because they don’t seem to be punished in this life.

Wal-Mart Memo Suggests Ways to Cut Employee Benefit Costs – New York Times

I don’t shop there. While I can’t keep up with who is evil and who is not most of the time, Walmart does such a good job of being immoral on a regular basis, I have a easy way to be reminded not to shop there.

3 Comments

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  1. 1
    Manu Sharma

    Deplorable as the practice of cutting down benefits of a few thousand employees is, if one is to objectively consider the overall impact of the retailer over society, one should not ignore the benefits that millions of American consumers have received over the decades since Wal-Mart introduced discount retailing to the world.

    By any measure the savings over the decades just in U.S. must run into billions of dollars from goods puchased off Wal-Mart and from others that adopted its model.

  2. 2
    Andrew Hinton

    Responding to the previous comment:

    Yeah it’s a good thing Wal Mart’s stuff is so inexpensive, otherwise its employees wouldn’t be able to have much of anything on their pay. (And Emergency rooms in hospitals around the country wouldn’t have that lovely influx of medicaid patients employed by the retailer.)
    Germany invented a lot of cool modernizing stuff between 1934 and 1945 too, but we don’t excuse the whole picture because of it.

  3. 3
    Manu Sharma

    In a NY Times piece “Our Love-Hate Relationship With Wal-Mart” (5-Nov, Times Select), Joseph Nocera makes the point that “as much as we hate the way they do business, we love the low prices they deliver to consumers. Americans have voted with their pocketbooks resoundingly in favor or Wal-Mart.”

    Also, with Wal-Mart’s business close to being 2.5% of GDP, consumer savings over the the past decades must actually be in hundreds of billions, if not more.

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