For the Wal Mart Shoppers

[kia027]

Re: For the Wal Mart Shoppers

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: dahJahPawtTwo</div><div class="ubbcode-body">btw Kia tanx fi some a de info, mi a guh use it pan de radio an inna mi campaign fi tear dung walmawt till dem change fi dem wicked ways </div></div>

most welcome

[Gen]

Re: For the Wal Mart Shoppers

yuh figet seh a nuh up suh mi live

every walmart chread pan yah yuh a guh tek it tun inna yuh campaign ? like mi seh yuh nuh have chick nor child suh yuh can gwaan run off yuh mouth mi nuh live a socialist country suh mi can shop weh mi want and so can the ress the people dem who want shop deh

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: dahJahPawtTwo</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Gen</div><div class="ubbcode-body">foofa tax dollars a guh pay fi the welfare/unempl. ? mine yuh mad ??
</div></div>

dis is some a de foolishness ppl always love fi seh... &quot;my tax dollars&quot;
They're not yours, never were yours and you've never had a say in anyting name tax, suh all a unno need fi tek out de &quot;MY&quot; when eva unno seh &quot;TAX&quot; cah yuh have no control a dat at all.
</div></div>

[Emperah]

Re: For the Wal Mart Shoppers

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Gen</div><div class="ubbcode-body">yuh figet seh a nuh up suh mi live

every walmart chread pan yah yuh a guh tek it tun inna yuh campaign ? like mi seh yuh nuh have chick nor child suh yuh can gwaan run off yuh mouth mi nuh live a socialist country suh mi can shop weh mi want and so can the ress the people dem who want shop deh

</div></div>

it nuh mattah a grasscyaat weh yuh live, yuh still nahv no say in anyting name tax. It nuh mattah who mi have ar wah mi nuh have mi naah shop deh even fi a book a matches. Yuh kno how much time ppl tell mi seh mi fi buy tings fi mi house from deh? Bunn dat Choo seh I am of de working class (not low, miggle ar high) when I know dat a corp treats workers a kind a way den dem nuh need fi mi dollaz. Too many ppl use de talk bout dem prices when it is jus fi dem addiction an nuttin else.

[Emperah]

Re: For the Wal Mart Shoppers

<span style="font-size: 17pt">The Wal-Mart You Don't Know </span>

<span style="font-size: 14pt">The giant retailer's low prices often come with a high cost. Wal-Mart's relentless pressure can crush the companies it does business with and force them to send jobs overseas. Are we shopping our way straight to the unemployment line?</span>

A gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is something to behold. The jar is the size of a small aquarium. The fat green pickles, floating in swampy juice, look reptilian, their shapes exaggerated by the glass. It weighs 12 pounds, too big to carry with one hand. The gallon jar of pickles is a display of abundance and excess; it is entrancing, and also vaguely unsettling. This is the product that Wal-Mart fell in love with: Vlasic's gallon jar of pickles.

Wal-Mart priced it at $2.97--a year's supply of pickles for less than $3! &quot;They were using it as a 'statement' item,&quot; says Pat Hunn, who calls himself the &quot;mad scientist&quot; of Vlasic's gallon jar. &quot;Wal-Mart was putting it before consumers, saying, This represents what Wal-Mart's about. You can buy a stinkin' gallon of pickles for $2.97. And it's the nation's number-one brand.&quot;

Therein lies the basic conundrum of doing business with the world's largest retailer. By selling a gallon of kosher dills for less than most grocers sell a quart, Wal-Mart may have provided a ser-vice for its customers. But what did it do for Vlasic? The pickle maker had spent decades convincing customers that they should pay a premium for its brand. Now Wal-Mart was practically giving them away. And the fevered buying spree that resulted distorted every aspect of Vlasic's operations, from farm field to factory to financial statement.

Indeed, as Vlasic discovered, the real story of Wal-Mart, the story that never gets told, is the story of the pressure the biggest retailer relentlessly applies to its suppliers in the name of bringing us &quot;every day low prices.&quot; It's the story of what that pressure does to the companies Wal-Mart does business with, to U.S. manufacturing, and to the economy as a whole. That story can be found floating in a gallon jar of pickles at Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is not just the world's largest retailer. It's the world's largest company--bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what

number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. And in its own category of general merchandise and groceries, Wal-Mart no longer has any real rivals. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined. &quot;Clearly,&quot; says Edward Fox, head of Southern Methodist University's J.C. Penney Center for Retailing Excellence, &quot;Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer has ever been.&quot; It is, in fact, so big and so furtively powerful as to have become an entirely different order of corporate being.

Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don't change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.

Of course, U.S. companies have been moving jobs offshore for decades, long before Wal-Mart was a retailing power. But there is no question that the chain is helping accelerate the loss of American jobs to low-wage countries such as China. Wal-Mart, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s trumpeted its claim to &quot;Buy American,&quot; has doubled its imports from China in the past five years alone, buying some $12 billion in merchandise in 2002. That's nearly 10% of all Chinese exports to the United States.

One way to think of Wal-Mart is as a vast pipeline that gives non-U.S. companies direct access to the American market. &quot;One of the things that limits or slows the growth of imports is the cost of establishing connections and networks,&quot; says Paul Krugman, the Princeton University economist. &quot;Wal-Mart is so big and so centralized that it can all at once hook Chinese and other suppliers into its digital system. So--wham!--you have a large switch to overseas sourcing in a period quicker than under the old rules of retailing.&quot;

Steve Dobbins has been bearing the brunt of that switch. He's president and CEO of Carolina Mills, a 75-year-old North Carolina company that supplies thread, yarn, and textile finishing to apparel makers--half of which supply Wal-Mart. Carolina Mills grew steadily until 2000. But in the past three years, as its customers have gone either overseas or out of business, it has shrunk from 17 factories to 7, and from 2,600 employees to 1,200. Dobbins's customers have begun to face imported clothing sold so cheaply to Wal-Mart that they could not compete even if they paid their workers nothing.

&quot;People ask, 'How can it be bad for things to come into the U.S. cheaply? How can it be bad to have a bargain at Wal-Mart?' Sure, it's held inflation down, and it's great to have bargains,&quot; says Dobbins. <span style="font-weight: bold">&quot;But you can't buy anything if you're not employed. We are shopping ourselves out of jobs.&quot;</span> ...

[Emperah]

Re: For the Wal Mart Shoppers

<span style="font-size: 17pt">Business Practices</span>
<span style="font-style: italic">
People are surprised that Wal-Mart would even want to locate a store at Ashland, with another one 10 miles away. But that's part of the Wal-Mart saturation strategy. They place their stores so close together that they become their own competition. Once everybody else is wiped out, then they're free to thin out their stores. Wal-Mart has 390 empty stores on the market today. This is a company that has changed stores as casually as you and I change shoes.

- Al Norman, Sprawl-Busters</span>


Wal-Mart employs more people than any other company in the United States outside of the Federal government, yet the majority of its employees with children live below the poverty line. &quot;Buy American&quot; banners are prominently placed throughout its stores; however, the majority of its goods are made outside the U.S. and often in sweatshops. Critics believe that Wal-Mart opens stores to saturate the marketplace and clear out the competition, then closes the stores and leaves them sitting empty. Freedom of speech issues also come into play. Musicians are at the mercy of Wal-Mart's stringent content rules, forcing many to create &quot;sanitized&quot; versions of their albums specifically for the discount chain.

The sentiment behind Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton's promise of a &quot;better life for all&quot; belies questionable business practices - many that have been challenged by employees, unions, environmentalists, recording artists and human rights organizations.

Working for Wal-Mart
Forbes magazine, polling business executives (not employees) has ranked Wal-Mart among the best 100 corporations to work for. Yet the employees on average take home pay of under $250 a week. The salary for full-time employees (called &quot;associates&quot is $6 to $7.50 an hour for 28-40 hours a week, which is typical in the discount retail industry. This pay scale places employees with families below the poverty line, with the majority of employees' children qualifying for free lunch at school. When closely examined, this amounts to a form of corporate welfare, as the taxpayer subsidizes the low salaries. One-third are part-time employees - limited to less than 28 hours of work per week - and are not eligible for benefits.

The company is staunchly anti-union. New employees are shown videotapes explaining that instead of unionizing, they benefit from the open door policy, allowing them to take their complaints beyond the supervisors to higher management. When the United Food and Commercial Workers tried to organize workers across the country, labor experts were brought in for &quot;coaching sessions&quot; with personnel who support unionization. Employees complained that these were intimidation sessions. Many such complaints are currently on file with the National Labor Relations Board.

Whereas Wal-Mart employees start at the same salary as unionized employees in similar lines of work, they make 25 percent less than their unionized counterparts after two years at the job. The rapid turnover - 70 percent of employees leave within the first year - is attributed to a lack of recognition and inadequate pay, according to a survey Wal-Mart conducted. Yet this can work to the company's advantage, since it is more difficult for unions to organize when there is constant employee turnover.



Wal-Mart's statement on unions:
At Wal-Mart, we respect the individual rights of our associates and encourage them to express their ideas, comments and concerns. Because we believe in maintaining an environment of open communications, we do not believe there is a need for third-party representation.


Wal-Mart is the leading employer of people of color in the United States. More than 125,000 African Americans and more than 74,000 Latinos work at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club store's nationwide. Two Latinos sit on the board of directors along with two women out of 15 board members. Only one woman serves as an executive officer of the company.

Full-time employees are eligible for benefits, but the health insurance package is so expensive (employees pay 35 percent - almost double the national average) that less than half opt to buy it. Another benefit for employees is the option to buy company stock at a discount. Wal-Mart matches 15 percent of the first $1800 in stocks purchased. Yet most workers can't afford to buy the stock. In fact, not one in 50 workers has amassed as much as $50,000 through the stock-ownership pension plan. Voting power for these stocks remains with Wal-Mart management.

Made in the U.S.A?
Despite a well-publicized &quot;Made in the U.S.A.&quot; campaign, 85 percent of the stores' items are made overseas, often in Third World sweatshops. In fact, only after Wal-Mart's &quot;Buy American&quot; ad campaign was in full swing did the company become the country's largest importer of Chinese goods in any industry. By taking its orders abroad, Wal-Mart has forced many U.S. manufacturers out of business. The chain was broadly criticized for being the primary distributor of many goods attracting controversy, including Kathie Lee Gifford's clothing line, Disney's Haitian-made pajamas, child-produced clothing from Bangladesh and sweatshop-produced toys and sports gear from Asia. Difficult working conditions also exist in the United States: In 1991, labor inspectors found labels for Wal-Mart brands being made in Manhattan's Chinatown. There, 16 and 17 year-old Chinese immigrants without permits had been working for one month without being paid.



Wal-Mart's statement on sweatshop allegations:
Wal-Mart strives to do business only with factories run legally and ethically. We continue to commit extensive resources to making the Wal-Mart system one of the very best. We require suppliers to ensure that every factory conforms to local workplace laws and that there is no illegal child labor or forced labor. Wal-Mart also works with independent monitoring firms to randomly inspect these factories to help ensure compliance. In fact, we conduct more than 200 factory inspections each week to ensure these facilities are being run legally and ethically.


Empty Boxes
Wal-Mart stores are often the size of four or five football fields - huge in scale compared to many of the small communities that they neighbor. Criticized for deserting stores that under-perform, Wal-Mart has left behind more than 25 million square feet of unoccupied space across the country (May, 2000). The company claims it tries to sell these properties, but the only potential buyers are other big retailers, and Wal-Mart will not sell real estate to its competitors. In one Kentucky town, an empty Wal-Mart was torn down at the taxpayers' expense .

[twiney]

Re: For the Wal Mart Shoppers

Unno lucky ... mi nah get no pay increase and just learning today say the govt trick mi employer and now them short another 27 million so I guess I'll be shopping at walmart even more now cause now mi going have to mek sure mi dollar stretch even more. when them stop sell the things mi need then mi stop shop deh.

[kia027]

Re: For the Wal Mart Shoppers

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Wendilina</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> <div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> no walmart in my community and there wont be one either </div></div>
Den yuh noh have noh proablem den .. it easy for you to go to the mom and pop cause that is what is close by you

<span style="font-weight: bold">There are 3 Walmarts that I have access to within less than a mile or so and all 3 get my patronage cause it's a way for me to help out di community. </span> </div></div>

<span style="font-weight: bold">Business Practices

People are surprised that Wal-Mart would even want to locate a store at Ashland, with another one 10 miles away. But that's part of the Wal-Mart saturation strategy. They place their stores so close together that they become their own competition. Once everybody else is wiped out, then they're free to thin out their stores.</span> Wal-Mart has 390 empty stores on the market today. This is a company that has changed stores as casually as you and I change shoes.

- Al Norman, Sprawl-Busters

from dahjah's article above

[Emperah]

Re: For the Wal Mart Shoppers

I thought of wendy when I read that too

[Gen]

Re: For the Wal Mart Shoppers

a nevah get one red cent fi mi rasie eedah

[kia027]

Re: For the Wal Mart Shoppers

I guess u gwine haffi shap yahso den

[Gen]

Re: For the Wal Mart Shoppers

kia mi hope a nuh the dollar store dem yuh a send mi guh enuh

[Emperah]

Re: For the Wal Mart Shoppers

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: McWho</div><div class="ubbcode-body">I guess u gwine haffi shap yahso den </div></div>

[Fyah]

Re: For the Wal Mart Shoppers

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Nunya</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Say wha...??? dahjah still live wid mummy and pops???? But aint dude like fiddy??? </div></div>

LOL!

<span style="font-weight: bold">Long Live WALMART!

God Bless America!

Peace, Love &amp; Longevity! </span>

[loops]

Re: For the Wal Mart Shoppers

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: McWho</div><div class="ubbcode-body">no walmart in my community and there wont be one either ; we actively fight against big box stores

and no I was not insinuating that Walmart is the only store that carry items made in China fi clarification </div></div>

same here...rejected in towns both north and south of here on route one. yet i can drive 30 minutes one way and find one...and 45 another for the hellish Super W.

we don't need them on every street corner...at least in my community, we're advocating for shopping local.

[Wendy]

Re: For the Wal Mart Shoppers

Wait unu did a gwaan good yessiday man.. arite.

Gen ..Twiney ..Vegas beg unu paas mi mi Bullet proof Vest, mi 2 M16 and mi yeye goggles fi mi dey.. It’s about to be on up in here

OK so unu waan talk bout Wal-Mart saturation strategy. Weh unu sey about:
1. A McDonald’s on every corner
2. A 711 every 200 feet
3. An Exxon gas station every tree stop light
4. A StarBucks here and ova dere
5. A Dollar tree Every odda Strip Mall

Come On now ..Walmart is running a freking business people. If the above can set up shap ANYWEY dem want why Wal-Mart cyan do di same? Imagine YAHOO a have a hissy fit sey Google a “saturate” di Search Engine market and dat noh right
Give me a break..

As wi a talk bout Google I can assure yuh Google will be the first fi tell unu sey dem wi gi unu wey unu search fah but dem DON’T stand by the content of the information unu choose to download.. yuh know some sites have <span style="font-style: italic">lies, half truths and misrepresentations.</span> For every 10 sites dat claim George Bush is a Bad President I can show you 20 more sites that say differently. Soh nat cause unu have Googles Skills mek unu have “<span style="font-weight: bold">FACT</span>” on unu side.

And a same soh mi Google and get dem site Yah dat discredit evry ting unu post pan Walmart. Soh unu come tell mi which a dese information is facts? <span style="font-style: italic">eenie meenie minee moh</span>!

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