I have a confession to make. I have never shopped at Wal-Mart. Never been enticed to go, never wanted to go. I know, it almost makes me un-American. Or maybe not...
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices (2005) is a documentary about the famous, or maybe infamous, retailer. It is not complimentary and it is not pretty. Wal-mart destroys many smaller communities in so many ways, and this movie details many of them.
I won't go not all the terrible practises that Wal-Mart habitually uses to give itself huge corporate profits, but they are numerous and they are pretty damn disgusting. And what is worse is the government corporate welfare they get to continue to be the mega discount giant. That is they get money from you and me so they can pay their shareholders.
For all the talk of stopping welfare, corporate welfare is the killer to our taxes. It is the killer of capitalism and free enterprise, and if there is any discussion of cutting welfare it needs to begin at stopping all this money going to corporations. That is not capitalism or the free market system.
But I digress...
Look, Wal-Mart has done some changing since this movie came out...or at least they have a better PR agency. But this film has made my gut feeling of avoiding Wal-Mart a factually based, intellectual decision too. Yeah, they have low prices---by driving out small family owned businesses, by degrading the environment, by underpaying employees and underemploying them, by offering terrible health plans, and by buying cheap goods that offer toxins from China...well you get the drift. those low prices are not worth it to me.
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