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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."
You need one of those ancient "greeters" as gate-keepers on the system. I don't even let people post comments on *my* lowly page without approving them first, how can they be so naive?
What, me worry?
Am I the only one surprised it took so long?
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
They should go a step further and allow college students to network with the 9 year old children making the products they're buying.
From that I have heard, Wal-Mart pays a decent amount, far more than the minimum wage. They aggressively hire people who normally have a hard time getting a job (elderly), they have benefits, and such. So why is their a small group of idiots protesting against them? Is it only because they are a large corporation?
-- Will program for bandwidth
(Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory)
Now if they had actually gone to their local Wal-Mart store and defaced that, I'd be more impressed.
I'd be even more impressed if they started hand-crafting their own dorm furniture from self-produced resources instead of just shopping at Target or Ikea instead.
On the larger problem, see today's New York Times article on China's (and soon, the world's) environmental problems.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
Most people out there know someone that worked at or works for Walmart. I have never met someone that had anything good to say about working there, yes even higher up district managers.
And if anyone is surprised that a publicity stunt / Advertising trick that intrudes on what many college students think of as their "hallowed ground" of friend networking backfired in such a way that it's incredibly embarrassing, they must be either silly or don't know what they are doing.
That's like Microsoft putting a "tell us how you love Microsoft" section in the middle of a linux community.
The fun part, Let's see if they try it on MySpace and expect a different result.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Walmart is an employer of last resort.
Employers of last resort tend to hire people who are already on the margins. Walmart is more likely to be drawing people from the welfare roles than say Sun Microsystems.
Since Walmart is an employer of last resort there will be a lot more movement between welfare roles and employment than in higher end companies. It is difficult to tell if Walmart is abusing the welfare system.
There are cases where Walmart has shown workers how to use the local welfare system. This appears to be abusive. However, these people are generally the marginalized people who the welfare system is intending to help. Even here it is difficult to say if Walmart is abusing the system. These people in the margins often only work at Walmart for a short spell. Learning about local public services is probably more valuable for them than becoming dependent on a job that they are unlikely to hold for a long period of time.
An employer of last resort will always have a greater give and take with the welfare system. It is a fallacy, however, to assume that companies that hire people off the welfare rolls are evil simply because their ex-employees are more likely to fall back onto the welfare rolls when the job is done.
Walmart bursts into a community where its not wanted and people there complain. They must be turning over a new leaf.
lol: You see no door there!
Last time I lived there I paid $850 for a one bedroom in Mountain View with a back yard. And that was right at the height of the tech boom in 1999.
Walmart isn't a employee friendly company. The reason their employees go on welfare is because they can't get full time work. walmart doesn't want have to pay benefits so there are few full timers.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
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...
The Facebook college crowd may mostly be out of their teenage years but they're still about rebellion and experimentation (college). Having the "grown ups" come in and be organized and taking over their little corner of the world just annoys them. Our Australian politicians have been trying to use the Net - social network sites (including myspace which does have a teenage bent) and wikipedia. They're quickly realizing that having some old ass politician come in and try and be one of the cool kids is just going to get them trashed. They're about as cool as golf pants. Well some corporations are going throught he same thing. Short of getting younger already cool representation (look at the softdrink companies hiring rock stars) and having a youngster targetted product range, this is what they can continue to expect.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I think it often happens with organizations that are large enough to be insulated from the world, or that have very active propaganda machines, that they start believing their own propaganda.
And Wal-Mart is probably one of these.
They probably do think that the anti-Wal-Mart people are just a few malcontents, and that for most people, Wal-Mart is the center of happy shiny communities. And so they are probably surprised to learn that among many people, especially the educated, they aren't popular.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
If someone is willing to do work for you for less, why isn't it moral to choose that person?
... americans who could have been designing technology instead?
.. products and services the world wants .. that Americans can provide.
.. there is already signs of labor shortage emerging in China ..factories are having to provide beter and better incentives for their works (google china labor shortage ) .. just to make products for export.
The alternative to Wal-mart is people starving and dying like in Africa where there is hardly any industry.
Wal-mart isn't forcing people to work at Chinese factories. People are choosing to work there instead of dying of starvation and preventable diseases on the farm.
American workers can easily do other stuff instead of repetitive and boring factory jobs. Plus with the flood of cheap goods less work would be needed. Come on gardeners get paid $50 an hour. You think a factory worker would get anything beyond minimum wage? Also, we currently have a 5% unemployment rate here. Which jobs taht people are currently doing would they have to leave to fill up the shoe making factories? Are you prepared to give up cell phones and great computer software so that you can have shoes made by americans
The world still needs cures for major diseases. There aren't cheap cars of BMW quality. Ferrari performance is not available cheaply yet. Not everyone has a large house, there is mad demand fror pre-fabbed structures so that infrastructure to be built. All of this shows there is a need for products and services
Do you think China has enough workers to construct all the machinery to develop their infrastructure? I don't think so
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.
This made me think of the Far Side strip where a demon is greeting newcomers to hell and the sign behind him says "This is the first day of the rest of your life."
In fact hell has been working on a "Web 2.0 style" social network for ages. I can't wait to meet up with all my friends there.
Every company is now trying to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. It's the equivalent of a guy trying to be cool in a hip. trendy nightclub wearing a pair of plaid golf pants.
It really surprises me that marketing departments don't take one look at the concept of a corporate Facebook page, MySpace page, or Second Life presence and fire the idiot who produced it.
Imagine trying to sell life insurance to a bunch of skater dudes drinking Mountain Dew...that's the success rate this will have.
Tell me again why unskilled labor should be payed at the same rate as a highly trained, skilled worker? If the pay was the same, what incentive would people have to learn skills and work in a more demanding, higher stress job?
These people chose to work at Wal Mart and knew going into it what the pay was. Its simple economics. Wal Mart pays poorly because they have an abundant pool of workers who are quite willing to work at their pay scale.
Don't like the wages? Take a few night courses and move up. Or just work somewhere else.
Don't like how Wal Mart treats its employees? Don't shop there.
Penn and Teller have spent too much time underwater for me to trust their opinion of Wal-Mart.
Maybe they should hire Chad.
They launched a campaign targeted at college students, trying to get them to discuss dorm decoration?
That might have worked on grade school kids, but college students aren't so easy to "put one over" on -- they're adults, and they're usually informed about the issues. Wal-Mart's marketing suits should have realized that their terrible reputation would precede them.
No, what .. didnt you say you already joined facebook?
Wal-mart just has cheap socks and asshole management.
I've heard the older you get, the more you might need asshole management. (I read that sentence wrong.)
Karnal
I think it is quite the reverse: If anything, Wal-Mart probably runs marketing surveys to try and get a reliable picture of how people in different demographics view their company. Your post sounds very much like "my friends and I don't like walmart, therefore the most other people must agree with us".
As far as the educated people go... I'll disagree with you there too. I'm finishing an honours degree with a scholarship for grad school in computer science and I love walmart, as do many of my university friends. From my observation, the largest concentration of walmart haters are arts students.
But I think that both of our opinions are going to be less accurate than the surveys that Wal-Mart, and any other large corp does/buys.
Open Your Mind. Open Your Source.
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.
I work at WalMart now, I make 8.30 an hour. For telling you that I make that much, I would be immediately fired on the spot. There are about 7 pay grades, and being that I work in the Electronics department I am on grade 6. Each pay grade equals to about a 40 cent difference in pay. There are two departments that are on my pay grade: Produce and Bakery. Everyone else is on pay grades 1-3, they make around 6.50 to 7.50, and the minimum wage is 6.15. In each department there are between 1 and 3 full time positions, and over 5 part time positions depending on the size of the store. Benefits for part-time associates are basically intangible. Company policy states they are not to receive over 32 hours a week, they are usually given about 28, so they can't afford health insurance. And they have to be with the company for two before they are even eligible, full time associates are eligible immediately. My wages are capped at 10.00 an hour. I will never make more than that without a promotion. Promotions are generally handed out to friends of management. Why do I really evil though? Because on more than one occasion with more than just a few people (myself included), management has gone back to modify the number of hours recorded in the system that you worked. People have gotten fired for working overtime, when the only reason they had overtime was because management held them over working on something (unloading an especially large truck, cleaning an isle where some jackass dropped a 6-pack of Corona and didn't bother to tell anyone, running a cash register and never being relieved, regardless of the number of times they called management and told them they needed to clock out, etc). Or maybe its the fact that after all the years, not a single manager has come up from the bottom of the company? Throughout your orientation you are told that WalMart promotes from within (also that unions are evil and only want your money, but that's an entirely different subject). But I have yet to see a manager who has actually worked below their current rank. How about the "Open Door Policy" where all associates are supposed to be able to go to management whenever there is a problem, but how the door is always locked with paper taped over the window. People have been fired for knocking too many times when the door was locked and a customer wanted to talk with them. Also, my store itself has been robbed too many times to count. Not petty theft I refer to, I'm talking about men with guns demanding money or merchandise. Yet there has never been even the consideration to hire any kind of security to protect neither the customers nor the employees. Surely some part of the 80,000 salary of the BOTTOM rank managers at my store could be taken to hire an armed guard or something. But oh well, I guess I'll just suck it up and not starve and continue to follow the WalMart-provided pamphlets helping me get on government money just so I can survive.
At least from my experiences here in Canada, they stock the exact same stuff as most other discount department stores, and pay their employees about the same amount. How much do you expect them to pay people to stock shelves?
In the US, where there is no national health care, it is left up to the employer to provide health insurance. This represents a cost to the company, and Wal-Mart is pretty good at avoiding it.
Its health plans are open to part-time employees (those who work fewer than a specified number of hours per week) only after a year of employment. Meaning, as a newly hired employee, you must wait at least a year before you can get any insurance at all. (And Wal-mart may force people to work off the clock to keep their hours-per-week low.) Furthermore, the plans that they offer are too expensive for the wages that they pay; the premiums are higher, the deductibles are higher, and the coverage is lower. So many eligible Wal-Mart employees are still unable to afford health care.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
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.
You are dead wrong. The U.S. has one of the lowest levels of unionization among industrialized countries. Union density was 12.4% in 2003, roughly 2/3 of Japan's (19.7%) and 1/2 of Canada (28.4%) or the E.U. (26.3%). Statistics used are from the U.S. Department of Labor.
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
Basically what Bendodge said.
Sooner or later, one of the companies, native or foreign would take the opportunity to drop prices a bit and steal business from the other companies.
Let's ask this question: If they'd take the opportunity to keep their prices the same if costs drop, why don't they raise prices? After all, what's to stop them from making more profit?
Heck - look at gasoline prices. Sure, it takes a little time, but when the refineries are operational and oil costs are down, gasoline at the pump does drop.
I don't read AC A human right
http://www.last.fm/user/Wal_Mart
I heard that SOMETIMES people even vandalize Wikipedia! I can't believe people these days! Seriously, what is the point of posting an article that pertains to a single page on a massive social networking site? Get a blog.
They treat them horribly? you mean worse then child prositution or working your self into an early grave in the fields? because that's often the choices a poor person has in "other" countries. they choose sweat shops, as horrible as they are, because they are the best choice they have. it's much the same as it was for our countries when they first industrialised.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I have seen at first hand the running of a 'Japanese' and a 'Domestic' car plant. The staff at the Japanese plant had much higher pay and benefits.
The problem stems from statistics, and how the numbers are played with. Basically in the 'west' retiree benefits are paid from 'current' income. In the past these 'western' companies saved money by failing to invest for the future benefits they contractually agreed too. They did this by setting up shells that actually gave the investment money back to the originating company This made the companies look profitable and growing, and raised their then share price. This sort of nonsense was encouraged by the markets and governments which fed back into the management which gave more of the same. Behind the scenes everyone crossed their fingers and hoped that growth would make up the difference. There were many at the time who said it was all a house of cards, but they were starved of research funding and quite effectively silenced. Now time has caught up with these companies and governments and they have to pay, which is then, by accountancy tricks, spread across the current employee base, making current employees look way more expensive and quite unproductive.
Contrast this with Japanese companies who invested for the future benefits with strict governmental controls on how they were allowed to do it. Now these companies not only receive income from the investments, they also have a much lower cost base as they only pay out for their current workforce which makes them look less than half the price and considerably more productive.
threadeds blog
sigs are hazardous to your health
True. But the fact that it may improve someones life isn't enough to put you in the clear. It is perfectly possible to improve someones life, while at the same time acting in a mannger that is morally and ethically bad.
People who have significantly less resources than you are often compelled to do what you want, because as you say, the alternative is worse, but it's not really a free choice because a choice to do X or have your children starve isn't a choice at all. (contracts signed under duress are invalid, the fact that in this sense the threat (hunger) isn't created by you doesn't make the choice any less forced)
Offering to feed peoples children, on the condition that they convert to christianity would be wrong.
Offering a woman who is in the wilderness with a broken leg a ride to the nearest hospital, on the condition that she give you a blowjob would be wrong.
Offering someone whose family is starving $2/day, on the condition that they work as slaves for you is wrong.
Yes, in each of these cases, not doing anything at all could be argued to be even worse. But that ain't enough. By that you've just demonstrated that the action is not the worst-possible-action. But there's a long step from being "not-the-worst" and to being "good".
The second example is particularily interesting; it would actually be a *crime* not to help a helpless person in such a situation.
Somehow though, that responsibility evaporates if it's a nation and not a single woman who is in trouble. And if it's a whole world, rather than a single human being, who choose not to help. (or to demand unreasonable compensation for the help)
What is the problem with buying $50 shoes made by people making $2/hour rather than $100 Nike-shoes made by people making $0.20/hour ? It's not as if the first is more expensive than the last....
Yeah, it's hard to know and avoid sweatshop products generally. But when you *do* know, and you *do* have a reasonable alternative, I don't think there's any question whatsoever what is the best choice.
Offering a woman who is in the wilderness with a broken leg a ride to the nearest hospital, on the condition that she give you a blowjob would be wrong.
Offering someone whose family is starving $2/day, on the condition that they work as slaves for you is wrong.
Yes, in each of these cases, not doing anything at all could be argued to be even worse. But that ain't enough. By that you've just demonstrated that the action is not the worst-possible-action. But there's a long step from being "not-the-worst" and to being "good".
The second example is particularily interesting; it would actually be a *crime* not to help a helpless person in such a situation. For all of your examples, choosing to help the people involved is not something that you are obliged to do in any way. Yes, you could establish your altruism by aiding them with no strings attached but you are not required to do so. (Some nations will probably have laws that require you to aid people in distress even if this comes at some cost to you - this changes things as you note.)
Assuming that you are not an altruist, however, then
Whether this becomes "good" or just remains "better" is entirely a subjective assessment. I would tend to think that so long as you are candid about what your offer entails, then giving more options is a good thing even if you are offering them for entirely selfish reasons. Whether that makes you a "good" person is a different question altogether, but that has no bearing on whether or not the offer should have been made.
As an example, if I were in grave debt I might be happy to hear the offering from the local loan shark with tendencies towards knee breaking so long as he's up front about his interest rates and methods of sanction. I might end up not accepting the offer, but at least I have it on the table along with all my other options.
sigs are hazardous to your health
Maybe next time you could let us know what your point is so we can actually discuss it, rather than have to guess.
Are you really arguing that the singular case of Charles Whitman (edifying though it might be) proves "beyond the shadow of a doubt" the behavior of all such cowards? Maybe I'll dumb it down a notch next time, but frankly, I come to slashdot to find people that don't need this service...
I'm really arguing that if the population is armed and therefore will return fire to the assailant, that this will not prevent the assault. This will not prevent the assailant from killing people, and this is proven by the fact that the circumstances I'm describing are historically recorded and well known. This only leads to the use of a different tactic from the assailant in order to carry out his intended attack.
Yes, some people in Virginia Tech simply blocked doors and evaded Cho's bullets, but that is just because he did not bother with difficult targets, and he was NOT standing in one place waiting to be cornered. He was shooting to kill and moving on. And the important bit which your "stymied" argument fails to take into account is that he set the new record for "most killed before I died". He did not insist on killing these people because he simply did not care about these people, he cared about numbers, about beating the record, and he did. Some tried to save themselves, and it worked, great! In case of a sniper, hiding behind cover would also work. These shooters aren't gods, they're simply cold blooded murderers. A sharp wit, a bit of luck and a survival instinct can get you out of their scorecard.
If conditions are that return fire is expected, the strategy will change. His goal was to get the world to notice his suicide, and he got exactly what he wanted. He was smart, he was methodical, he was patient, and he was insane. Had the campus been armed, instead of walking around shooting people at point blank, he would have snipped, bombed, poisoned, whatever. He could have gassed a whole sleeping dorm with Chloroform stolen from the chem lab and killed them in their sleep for all we know. He had a goal, he devised the means to fit the current environment in order to accomplish his goal. Devising a specific counter-strategy will only work once, maybe twice, and the next mass murderer will adapt his strategy: Change the environment, and the next psycho will just change the means. He'll go pick on the Amish, or start with the Amish to draw away rescue personnel and then detonate remote bombs with a cell phone. The possibilities are endless.
The point is that there is no magic fix to the mass-murder suicide problem, and one of those magic fixes that won't work is having more people armed. I too would like a gun on me if someone tried to kill me, so I should try to kill them right back, but that is not an actual solution to the actual problem, it's a fantasy to make us feel safe.
Is that clear enough?
You can't take the sky from me...