Wal-Mart, I should really stop shopping there.

So I was just reading this article I found from December 2003. It's about Wal-mart and the horror of it all. I knew there were bad things in dealing with Wal-mart but holy crap. The person who wrote the article, found here, gave multiple very specific examples but ultimately he came to one point. Perhaps Sam Walton is in fact the most powerful man in the world. But honestly, the point he ended up making was this. We want clean air, clear water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world, and yet we aren't willing to pay for anything manufactured under those restrictions. Small businesses are another story, but at a larger scale big companies like Levi Strauss and Master Lock are affected by an extreme amount from dealing with Wal-mart. Wal-mart forces manufacturers to maintain the lowest prices possible making most of them move out of the US where products can be manufactured cheaper. His best example of this was Master Lock. In an effort to maintain the low costs Wal-mart required to not be taken off their shelves, Master Lock moved much of it's manufacturing facilities from Milwaukee to Nogales, Mexico. The Milwaukee employees of Master Lock who shopped at Wal-Mart to save money helped move their own jobs right to Nogales. Not consciously, not directly, but inevitably.

If you happen to have about a half hour to spare and you're at all interested I suggest reading the article. Some of the statistics as far as the amount of national revenue that Wal-mart accounts for, among other things, are staggering. Simply put, the fact that they do more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined, scares me a lot. I always knew Wal-mart was evil.

Have a nice summer!