Wal-Mart - Shopping Your Way Out of a Job
Wal-Mart is, I assume everyone knows, the largest retailer in the United States. It has approximately 3,000 retail stores and last year sold $244 billion dollars worth of goods. Anyone shopping for a bargain is likely to consider if not shop at Wal-Marts. Nobody beats their prices.
And there is a reason why nobody beats their prices. Wal-Mart has a habit of buying products from a supplier for the lowest price that supplier can afford and then latter forcing that supplier to sell the products to Wal-Mart for less and less over time. At first, suppliers can squeeze their profit margin and change their operating procedures to lower their prices to meet Wal-Mart's demands, but eventually something's got to give. Suppliers are unlikely to drop Wal-Mart as Wal-Mart becomes a supplier's largest customer. It's hard to lose your largest customer no matter how small the profit margins may get. Eventually a supplier is left with two options - go out of business, or transfer their production overseas where production costs are lower. Either way, their US employees are laid off and looking for a new job. This has happened over and over again to Wal-Mart suppliers affecting the US manufacturing base. How Wal-Mart expects laid off workers to continue shopping at Wal-Wart is puzzling.
Yes, everyone wants a bargain, but not at the expense of theirs or their neighbor's job. Wal-Mart needs to look at the long term picture and not just of its bottom line. America needs to maintain its manufacturing base and cannot afford Wal-Mart's hardball purchasing tactics. Wal-Mart used to tout its 'made in America' product theme. For American worker's sake, it needs to return to that theme and stop forcing American manufacturing jobs overseas.
11/14/03 ( 595 )
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