Wal-Mart is EVIL EVIL EVIL

OK, I didn't come up with this thought randomly today, but clearly came to this decision after watching Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. I've obviously suspected this for a long time, backed up especially by Buy Blue, and while I clearly know they're evil, I also to some degree understand that business is business - if everyone stopped shopping at Wal-Mart, city council members stopped Wal-Mart from building in their city (like the state of Vermont has done), and, in theory, manufacturers stopped selling their products to Wal-Mart, the company wouldn't yield the power they currently do.

My review of the movie was good - I'd definately recommend Netflixing it. My thoughts:

• Seriously, people have to question their city council members and legislatures that both give tax breaks to build stores, and allow Wal-Mart to drain state's funding for Health/Human Services -- the movie says Wal-Mart distributes info on WIC, food stamps, Medicare/Medicade insurance to new employees so they can sign up for their state benefits. So sketchy.

• The Walton family gives less than 1% of their worth to charity. Bill Gates gives 58%. This discrepency is based on Sam - he didn't believe in giving "any undeserving stranger a free ride... any money given to charity should come from employees or shareholders." Evil.

• While Wal-Mart theoretically offers full time employees health insurance, as they interviewed employees, single people working for Wal-Mart were essentially paying the same amount for insurance premiums as I do - and their prescription coverage is minimal at best... No wonder single moms trying to pay a "family" premium have to have their kids on state insurance while they go uninsured. Evil.

• Lots of clergy have petitioned and advocated against Wal-Mart, which I didn't know. It's mostly in poor communities and one pastor basically stated that Wal-Mart plays themselves off as a "Christian" company, and then keeps their employees in poverty and that's un-Christian. Makes sense to me.

• 80% of crime on Wal-Mart property occurs outside the store in parking lots. Granted, there are many many Wal-Mart parking lots so it'd be silly for there to be no crime in their parking lots considering square footage of parking lots that exist. However, Wal-Mart internal documents have shown this, they've tried patroling parking lots (which results in minimizing crime to as low as 10%) but for money reasons, they stopped any parking lot surveilence. I'd have to know if other retails have pkg lot security in order to really view this as evil on Wal-Mart's part, but it's still sketchy.

• There's dialogue when the credits run about the Worthington, MN store -- paraphrased, it says that the Wal-Mart sign is 10' over code and the building inspector red flagged it. The next day, the district manager (no longer w/ the company) received a check for $10K to give to the building inspector. The day after that, the violation was un-written up.

• The documentary is much less forceful that Michael Moore's - they do very little narrative aside from what those interviewed say. I found this refreshing and to some degree, less propaganda-ish. One of the most disturbing things is that they compile probably 20 real Wal-Mart commercials that clearly were developed to go against each claim that has been brought against Wal-Mart -- from being racist to hating women to paying employees low wages to having minimal benefits to being bad environmentalists. Seeing all the commercials in the span of an hour or so is disturbing because they're trying to market their brand to cover up their evil.

• The "alleged" overtime not getting paid complaints from past employees seem very founded - the store's budget for help is lowered every month as the volume quota for the store is raised. After a store's been open a while, they are cutting their budget so closely they need to have people stay later than scheduled to finish things - if they aren't willing to stay late they're fired. Talk about a store that needs a union.

• Speaking of unions, the day the word "union" is overheard by a manager, they're required to report it to HQ. The next day, a team from AK flies in to "take over" the store and squash the union idea using Bush-like spying tactics. Wondering if this is where Bushy got the idea for spying? :)

• I hadn't thought about Wal-Mart being awful for the environment, but apparently to save $ they don't put their lawn fertilizers under any cover - they just put pallets in the pkg lot. When bags split and it rains, it runs into rivers sometimes. That happening is somewhat understandable. But when the county called the store and HQ to complain and ask them to change it, they screened calls and ignored them until a news story ran. Then it was fixed the next day. And they put together a "Wal-Mart is pro-environment" TV ad.

• When someone suggested Wal-Mart charge more in order to be able to pay employees more, they asked, "Should we pay our thousands of employees more, or save millions of poor Americans money every day that they shop here?" Simply stated, capitalism says that Wal-Mart is right to charge a low price and not pay people more just for the heck of it. That said, I'd still say they're f-ing evil -- some of their practices are illegal in addition to evil.

• Aside from the documentary, this news broke about a man being detained and suspected to be a criminal because he was black and attempting to buy over $10K in gift cards with a corporate check issued to Wal-Mart after the gift cards were pre-ordered. Nice racial profiling, Wal-Mart.

I want to now rewatch the MSNBC special about Wal-Mart - I wonder if that's Netflixable?