Imagine if those products were all sustainably produced by workers making fair wages using processes that protect the environment. Already, Walmart rings up more sales than any other company in a host of retail categories, including toys, books, CDs, DVDs, magazines, dog food, diapers, jewelry, and groceries. Concerned consumers need to take an encompassing view of the retail situation in the US and work to provide other choices for people in our communities who are struggling economically.Īt the same time, concerned consumers can use the power of their dollars to force Walmart, the largest corporation in the world, to use their infrastructure more for good than for ill. These costs, then, are born by all of us, including the low-income consumers supposedly assisted by Walmart’s “low prices.” What’s more, for individuals stuck without retail options-whether because of poverty or because big-box stores have killed off local businesses-the truth is that Walmart’s “low prices” aren’t always exactly that. Walmart externalizes its costs any way it can-by pushing its health-care costs onto local communities, for example, or by soliciting taxpayer dollars to subsidize its sprawl. In its relentless pursuit of ever-cheaper products and ever-larger market shares, Walmart reverses that trend. While the job of internalizing business costs was nowhere near complete, the trend was in the right direction. Until Walmart, the trend in the American marketplace had been to increasingly internalize the costs of doing business, from paying decent wages and offering health-care benefits, to limiting the work-week to 40 hours, to curbing environmental impact. It’s a race to the bottom where everyone loses.” “Their push to lower their costs year after year has driven down wages here and abroad, sent American manufacturing jobs overseas, rapidly expanded toxic industrial production in countries that lack rigorous labor or environmental protections, and contributed to a host of other social and environmental ills. “Walmart makes the corporate business model even more destructive,” says Erin Gorman, director of Green America’s Walmart Action Campaign. There can be no place in a sustainable economy for a corporation like today’s Walmart that advances a business model riddled with negative repurcussions-from its low-wage, environmentally destructive factories in developing countries, to shuttered local businesses all across America. The Walmart economy is the opposite of sustainable.
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