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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.
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.
Maybe because the cost of living in california is exceedingly high, and even making $65,000/year there is barely enough to live alone without any assistance?
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!
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.
When an argument is using a propaganda sight and Penn and Teller as its sources, we all lose, kids.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
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.
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.
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.
.. the person wouldn't have a job at all. Walmart is not causing them to be poor. They would be poorer without Walmart. I mean, shit in that case i am being coerced to work too .. as is Bill Gates and Donald Trump. To make a coercion accusation, you have to show that Wal-mart created the horrible farming conditions. Good luck, because those conditions have existed for a long time (people in China as recently as 1950 had a life expectancy of under 40 years .. and infant mortality was very high).
.. by your logic, do I have to pay them my whole salary for life? After all, the value of the doctors work is my whole life. Obviously, if the doctor demanded that .. I would have chosen a different cheaper doctor.
So it's work for walmart or die. I don't see how that's a choice. In fact, I'd call it coercion.
How is it coercion? They aren't the ones causing people to die. Think about it, without the factory
If someone is willing to do work for you for less, why isn't it moral to choose that person?
Because in this case, you'd be exploiting them by paying them wages less than the value of what they produce
Unless a person is being forced to work at gunpoint, that is impossible. Value of work is determined by supply and demand -- not anything intrinsic to the product. If there are others who are willing to provide a product for cheaper, I have the moral prerogative to choose the cheaper one provided by someone who is willing to work harder. The whole point of any work/pay contract is that the each person is choosing to work because they are going to be compensated equal to or more than what they feel the usefulness of their time/energy is. You can always choose not to work if you feel the deal is bad. So a doctor gives me a simple antibiotic and cures me of pneumonia so I live and can work
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.
Penn & Teller use the Straw Man a lot, a potent and popular tactic in a visual medium.
They find someone to act as the spokesperson for the position they're arguing against, and that person is always going to be someone who is utterly disagreeable to pretty much anyone who isn't a complete psycho.
For the Wal-Mart episode, they want to show what the anti-Wal-Mart crowd looks like, so they find these two nasty people who print up nasty t-shirts belittling some cruel stereotype of the Wal-Mart shopper, as well as the stereotype's wife and children.
Who's going to agree with that?
Then, on the pro-Wal-Mart side, they've got a nicely-dressed, soft-spoken young college professor.
Penn & Teller are funny and I agree with a lot of their conclusions, but they are very manipulative in their approach.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
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.
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