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Users Trash Wal-Mart On Its Facebook Site
hhavensteincw writes "Only two weeks after Wal-Mart launched its latest foray into Web 2.0 land, Facebook users have hijacked a page aimed at selling back-to-school supplies to college kids to instead post rants about the company's labor practices. Of the 100-plus comments, none relates to dorm decorating as Wal-Mart had originally envisioned."
The fun part, Let's see if they try it on MySpace and expect a different result.
They might actually have a modicum of success of myspace, unlike Facebook . Facebook users are more socioeconomically advantaged than those on MySpace and tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college, and who end up having higher income than their myspace counterparts.
Simply put, myspace users are more likely to shop at Wal-Mart than Facebook users.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
When my girlfriend worked at wal-mart last year she made $8.50/hour, while the minimum wage was $5.15. Before that she worked for a small business downtown which paid her $5.50. Six years ago when I worked at wal-mart they paid me $7.50/hr. So yes, wal-mart does usually pay significantly better than other retail businesses.
And those would be the same Pen & Teller that think that arming students would end all school massacres? They're funny magicians, not prophets.
You can't take the sky from me...
One look at the YouTube video confirms that Penn and Teller have no interest in examining the Walmart issue. Might I suggest http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walm art/ as a more reputable source?
There are so many things wrong and destructive about Walmart that it's hardly worth trying to communicate them.
If you can't see it, it can only be because you don't want, or are incapable of believing it.
Where my dad lives there was a vocal minority who complained, and the city refused to let them build a walmart. Or just about any other big box store. What happened? the surrounding cities let all these big box stores come in, and their economy flourished. Meanwhile, their retail sector pretty much disappeared, because everybody went to the surrounding towns (that aren't more than 1/2 an hour away) to do their shopping. They are finally letting these stores move in, after they saw how negatively not having them affected their business sector. Luckily things seem to be recovering from this bad decision.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Reactionary internet graffiti aside, the divisiveness of Wal-Mart signals a more complicated problem than the superficial split between the caring and the cold-hearted.
Wal-Mart's revolting nature comes on a gut level, and not a rational one. There are arguments against its existence for worker's rights reasons, for anti-globalization reasons, and for aesthetic reasons - but most people go looking for these reasons in the first place as a result of actual time spent in the store, and the feeling of sweaty, raw animal terror that the experience inspires in a person who has a choice to go elsewhere.
Should Wal-Mart be allowed to exist? Of course it should. It's a free market, baby, and they are PROVIDING. Jobs, cheap-ass crockery, optometry, etc. But that's no reason not to feel overwhelming pity for the people that are forced to shop and work there. It's a horrible place, but so is the overnight shift at a city hospital. You can't get rid of a place like that because it is ugly.
If anything, Wal-Mart does a public service for the impoverished of a community. It forces the middle-class to look at them -- under stark, neuron-scrambling fluorescents -- and see that they are neither institutionally lazy nor inhuman. They are falling apart, and the only people interested in helping are a corporation with a profit motive that panders to their every prejudice and weakness.
The first impulse is to trample that ant-hive. Find a reason to get rid of it. The ant-hive is the problem!
But Wal-Mart is a challenge. Can we do better to provide for the bottom of society? If not, then Wal-Mart is better than nothing. I think we can do better. I think -- in the same way that Scientology is challenge to scale down the state protections for religion -- Wal-Mart is a challenge to improve the quality of life of impoverished America. It is the natural outgrowth of the system that we have created. It is a website under construction that says "FIX ME."
So shop Wal-Mart, think real hard about how to make it better, and SAVE.
Labor unions only have power as long as the companies that sponsor them are willing to blank-out the law of supply and demand. I remember a piece by George Reisman about the auto industry back when Japan was seriously kicking the American companies' asses (Ok, still true), and it's not even that the pay was significantly lower (about 5 or 6 dollars different, IIRC, in an industry where 25-30 dollar wage rates aren't uncommon). In a union shop, employees don't compete with each other for a higher spot on the food chain, don't cross train (their job is their job, and they're not going to sweep floors or mount tires if their job goes a little slow that day), and any attempt to swap benefits plans for something more economical requires a union vote. The non-union Japanese shops were able to save considerable money both on benefits and man-hours.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
My complaint about walmart and their kind isn't so much the shitty labour conditions, low pay, or buying stuff from China. For me, it's the total lack of selection that gets me.
For such huge stores, they have many different sorts of products, but in each category usually very low selection. About the only well represented categories are clothing and snack foods. But even in the clothing it's fairly low. I haven't seen cotton shorts there at the one near my place, in a long time for instance.
I went looking for various things for the kitchen a couple weeks back. They had maybe 2-3 styles of plates, 2 styles of cups, etc. Barely any of the odds and ends [e.g. peeler, can opener, cheese grater, etc]. Then head over to home hardware. No real variety in the light bulbs, power strips, fuses, etc. Head over to the music dept, oh look 300 country albums and the top 20 from Sony/EMI/etc. Wow, wonders never cease to amaze me! I've walked out of dept stores many times this year alone empty handed. Not for lack of want, but just because they didn't have anything I needed. And I have to ask myself, for a store so big, how can they fail in this respect so miserably?
I like the concept of a dept store, where I don't have to drive around the city to get say towels, movies, dishes, some junk food, etc. It's simpler, faster, and environmentally friendlier. But I find myself increasingly having to shop around anyways.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Perhaps you should go to the "Career Preference Dashboard" on the WIRE. It's easy: sign on to the WIRE, click on the green "Life" tab and finally click on "Career Preference" in the "My Career" box. Now research some of what you are saying. Electronics is not pay grade 6. Electronics salesfloor is pay grade 4. Electronics department manager is pay grade 7. Assuming you started as an Electronics salesfloor associate at $8.30, and assuming you had previous work experience for extra credits that bumped your pay (the difference between pay grade 3 and pay grade 4 is $0.20 or $0.30, so if you are making $8.30 per hour, you must have had some extra credits), then your cap will be higher than $10.00. I'm afraid I don't remember the exact formula, but the cap for pay grade 4 would be (for you) around $13.00 to $14.00.
As for promotions being handed out to friends, what happens in your store does not mean that it happens in all stores.
Another example of "what happens in your store does not happen in all stores": Remember your comment about management working "below their current rank", I've seen my store manager go outside and push carts numerous times when our store was low on carts. He started out in the company as a cart pusher, by the way. I've seen the front end assistant manager clean a bathroom. I've seen a grocery assistant manager mop the floor. Management expectations start with your store manager. One store manager is not a representative sample of all store managers.
Management (or anybody else) modifying the number of hours an associate works is a terminable offense. I am not salaried management, but I have the ability to edit an associate's time. If I modified an associate's time (either increased or decreased), I have no doubt in my mind that I would be terminated on the spot. There's a report that runs every Saturday morning called the "Time Clock Archive" that lists every associate's time and if that time was edited, it lists the name of the person who edited it. The information is also recorded in the SMART system under the program called "Electronic Time Adjustment" (select "Change/View Time Adjustment"). All associates are given access to the Electronic Time Adjustment automatically when hired.
The "Open Door Policy" is more than your local store management. Have you tried talking to your district manager? Your regional manager?
What Wal-Mart provided pamphlets? In my store, we're usually griping (under our breath) about the number of customers coming in to our store that do not have jobs and whip out their EBT cards- customers we are supporting with our tax dollars.
Don't like the wages? Take a few night courses and move up. Or just work somewhere else. Wal-Mart destroys locally run "mom & pop" stores, lowers the real estate value of business districts, and as a result Wal-Mart is one of the few businesses left. People don't choose to work at Wal-Mart; they're forced to. Furthermore, corporate executives of some areas even ask that its employees go onto welfare, medicare, and medicaid. (See "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price"). I'd think more people would jump on the anti-Wal-Mart wagon if they knew our tax dollars were being used to give Wal-Mart a free ride like that.
Y'see, something about this post bugs me. Most people in the lower salary brackets are less likely to move up to higher level salary brackets (i.e., earn better jobs). That's because they don't have the proper resources to make that kind of progress. I'm sure there are some cases where people can attend night classes and earn some sort of certification for their efforts, but that's the exception from the norm. Fortunate folks like to think things are simple all across the board - for all people rich and poor-, but when you're smart enough to the point where you have a college degree (and can comprehend the majority of the stuff on
One of the other problems people have is that they don't like to acknowledge this kind of social issue in today's society. [sarcasm]God forbid we ever acknowledge the plight of the poor and feel guilty about being so well-off. We might just feel a bit too uncomfortable to even turn on our television sets.[/sarcasm] People think that if they don't acknowledge these issues then the issues will go away. And even if they do have to read about it, they'll just cast it off with a simple no-bs remark "don't like such-and-such? don't give em' your business." If things were that simple, I would've stopped paying my taxes when we went to war with Iraq in 2003.
That's just bullshit. Working is mutual exploitation. I go to work for 8 hours a day because I value the money I get more than the work I put in. My employer pays me because they value my work more than they value the money they pay me. Both my employer and I receive value from the setup, and if either of those conditions ceases to be true, I'm going to stop working there. Same thing with Walmart. If the tard stocking shelves thinks their labor is worth more than minimum wage, they can find a job where they get paid what they're worth. Nobody's holding a gun to their head.
That's a beautiful thought, but it doesn't work like that in practice. One of the reasons why is that there is usually not an unlimited supply of jobs that one is able to get. Do you really think anyone would go get at job at Walmart in the first place if there's something better? We all need some things to survive and to live a decent life (you only get one) and some people apparently have to work at Walmart to get those things, there's the gun.
But the you can't just magically declare "My labor is worth $100 an hour" and expect people to pay you that much when there's a ton of people doing the same exact thing for a lot less money. Walmart pays what they do because their employees accept it. It's as simple as that.
Ever herd of organized labour?
You capitalism haters are all the same. You'll go on and on bitching about capitalism, but you'll never propose anything better. It isn't perfect, but it beats the shit out of every other economic system that's been devised.
Pure capitalism is really something awful. I'd propose a mixed economy just like what the US have right now (but with a better mix), though I guess I can't really be placed in the group of capitalism haters.
What next? You want to tell us about lean production (where Toyota is world leader, bar none)? Total quality management (which was laughed out by everybody, except by the Japanese, who listended very carefully and then went to implement it)? Innovation, like Hybrids (not feasible and too expensive for most, except for some Japanese companies)?
Next you will reason that over-motorized GM junk is unsellable in the rest of the world due to gas guzzling, quality problems and overall borishness, while we all no that's a French conspiracy to hurt America.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk