by Josef A

Created on: May 11, 2009

It is rather inappropriate to label a company as bad. In particular, if the company does what millions appreciate: providing affordable every day necessities. Approximately one third of Americans visit Wal Mart's stores regularly. Many of the shoppers have little other choice than going for the deep discount products, others shop there deliberately to save cash for other purchases. To summarize this early on, either people have no other option or they like shopping there. Hardly arguments you can base your criticism on.

Of course, people blame Wal Mart for allowing all sorts of evils such as sweatshops, irresponsible farming practices, unfair employee treatment, and so on. However, people should learn to distinguish between a corporate reaction to demand it meets on the marketplace and other types of, more serious failures. Enron was clearly a bad company in that sense. It obviously broke numerous laws and it is well-known how the story ended. Things unfold quite differently with the people behind Wal Mart. It is not their fault that society creates a large proportion of American people that struggle to make ends meet. It is not their fault that some developing countries have such poorly educated people that are willingly offering their labor for a ridiculously low salary. It is not Wal Mart's fault either that America is a society where showing wealth is essential to many and to appear more affluent people save on groceries in order to buy a more expensive car, designer cloths or similar. Blaming Wal Mart, which is undoubtedly involved in undesirable practices, is just looking for a scapegoat.

If we want to stop those practices we need to educate the poor in developing countries better. We need to create a society that is willing to pay the price for responsibly produced food and cut down on luxury to afford this. We need to provide the relatively poor in rich countries, as the US certainly is, with higher income that they are not forced to shop in deep discount stores anymore. If we have done all that, there won't be any Wal Mart as we know it. It either goes out of business or offers different, higher quality products. As long as such change does not happen and I severely doubt it will any time soon, it is just in vain to criticize Wal Mart for all this. Just assume Wal Mart changes or is forced to change its policies, someone else would gladly take its place and meet the ever increasing hunger for cheap food and consumption items.

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