Walmart Sucks. Just Don't Go There.

This is an old refrain, but I think it has to be repeated now and then. Yes, a lot of other retailers suck for some of the same reasons. But Walmart is the biggest and the baddest, guilty of the most egregious instances of big box retailer malfeasance. Some reasons to boycott Walmart:

1. Walmart's entrance into a town invariably causes small, local businesses to go belly-up. This has happened again and again across the country. Don't encourage the beast.

2. Walmart pays substandard wages to its associates. Health insurance has historically been prohibitively expensive for them as well. Then it has been known to frequently tell its workers to find financial aid through government programs, which means our tax dollars are subsidizing Walmart's unwillingness to pay livable wages. Ex-employees also allege that stores are intentionally kept understaffed, and that "full time" employees are given far fewer than 35 hours per week. There have been many documented wage-and-hour abuses.

3. Walmart is among the most aggressive companies when it comes to union busting. Even if you don't like unions, workers have a legal right to organize to advocate for better wages and working conditions. Rather than give in to unions, Walmart shows blatantly anti-union videos that misrepresent union protections. It also carries out extreme surveillance activities, including training managers to be paranoid about organizing activities and cameras on workers throughout stores. It employs scare campaigns among both employees and management to stop discussion about unionization even before it begins. Once a union begins to organize, Walmart has been known to consistently use tactics of questionable legality to scare employees into voting against a union.

4. Walmart has faced a class action suit by women across the country who say they were discriminated against becomes of their gender. Reports of corporate culture suggest this was widespread at one time, although it's unclear whether Walmart has mended its way as it claims.

5. When a Walmart opens in a town, it often receives subsidies from local governments in order to attract it. This may include government money used to build roads and other infrastructure. Walmart has received at least an estimated $1 billion in subsidies in recent years, often from municipalities that were trying to attract jobs but which in the process short-changed public schools and other municipal services. Worse, Walmart has been known to pick up and and move its entire store a couple miles away in order to avoid taxes, thus breaking its implicit social contract with the cities that subsidize them in the first place.

6. Walmart is the leading retail importer from China, importing billions of dollars of products each year from that nation. Chinese factory workers toil in sweatshop conditions for only a few dollars a day. Allegedly, such factory workers are forced to lie about their working conditions when government inspections take place.

7. Walmart also imports many of its goods from other developing nations, which have no wage or working condition protections at all. The company has been known to ignore inspectors' recommendations when factories in these companies are visited.

8. The evil that really says it all: the difference between CEO pay and average associate pay. For instance, in 2005, CEO Lee Scott made $27 million, while the average full time sales associate made about $13 thousand. Ask yourself, did Lee Scott really work *that* much harder than his sales associates? And when you compare his salary to the international factory workers, the situation becomes nothing short of obscene.

9. Sam Walton's surviving immediate family is worth well over $100 billion. Do you really need to contribute to that?

10. Walmart has a dismal record of security to protect its workers and customers. Apparently it uses its security capabilities, including camera and surveillance, primarily to bust unions.

There's more, but that should be enough. Please feel free to correct me if you think any of this has changed over the past decade. Certainly Walmart claims to have improved in some ways, but I can assure you that nothing much has changed with regard to employee pay and organizing rights, as well as cheap imports from cheap labor abroad. And when a Walmart comes to town, it will naturally have a negative impact on many existing business. That's a fact.

If you haven't seen it before, take a look at acclaimed filmmaker Robert Greenwald's 2005 movie WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Prices. Although much of the above information is well-documented, the film contains this information and more.