4/5 Good information but boringly presented, needed more 'Snap'.
  by Schtinky (California)
'Wal Mart, The High Cost Of Low Price' is filled with first hand testimonials and some hard-fact figures that will help in validating your hatred of this greedy giant, and visually exposes those in other countries who are ruthlessly used as slaves to produce the cheap products you purchase when you patronize this monolith.

These "jobs" provided to the labor forces of India, China, Bangladesh, and Mexico are not 'good wage' jobs even for third world standards. The people are overworked, underpaid, and forced to work in sub-human conditions. These human beings make 13 to 17 cents and hour, and work 10 to 18 hour days without breaks, all so you can have that $1.49 blouse.

Exposed in this film are the squalid, rent controlled apartments in China, provided by the company, that put to shame the most rancid ghetto house in your hometown. And if the employee chooses not to live in these rat-infested housing developments, the rent is still deducted from their wages. Wal-Mart has managed to lower the work standards set for these hard-pressed, low wage, third-world countries that other companies are going to follow, sucking down the standards of working all across the world.

The manager of the Mexico factories went on a tour to make sure that working conditions were humane. He was fired when he reported that the conditions were intolerably inhumane. In his own words, he didn't think retaliation would be brought against him for doing his job.

If you think it was a good thing that America abolished slavery, then think again before you go into a Wal-Mart. Just because the US is no longer "importing" slaves, doesn't make it right to continue to use slavery in other countries to produce high profits for personal gain. Wal-Mart's practices are no different than bringing slaves over from Africa to pick our cotton, it's still a cheap way for the rich to get richer at the expense of human blood and sweat.

Intermittently inserted in the film is a speech made by Lee Scott to the high-end employees and stockholders of Wal-Mart, which sounds very much like an Amway pep-talk. Lee Scott's earnings for 2005 were $27,207,799.00. The average Wal-Mart hourly employee's was $13,861.00.

Interesting facts: After 9/11, the Walton's built themselves an underground bunker in case of another terrorist attack, costing millions of dollars that should have went into paying back the Government for having to subsidize their employee's un-affordable medical benefits.
The Walton family gave less than 1% of their wealth to charity. Bill Gates, not even a nice man himself, gave 58%.
The "Critical Need" fund, set up to assist Wal-Mart employees in emergencies, received five million dollars from Wal-Mart employees (making $13,861.00 annually) and only $6,000.00 from the Walton family, who made, collectively, 102 billion.
Wal-Mart actually had a commercial campaign about "buying American" while all their products come from sweatshops overseas.

Wal-Mart has refused to address crime statistics that show an upswing of violent crime in their large, remote, under-lit and un-protected parking lots, putting their customers in danger and taxing the local law enforcement. The State of California alone paid out 80 Million dollars in medical benefits to poverty-level Wal-Mart employees because the 102 Billion Dollar Walton family does not want to give their "associates" fair medical benefits.

There are many ways to hate Wal-Mart and its ilk, and many books out on the subject, but I recommend watching this DVD so you can actually see the slave workers and conditions overseas that these selfish billionaires exploit without passing down their profit to the "small people" who helped build their empire. The presentation could have used a little more snappiness, and the DVD starts out very slow, but keep watching and you will eventually see the monster peeking out from behind your curtain.
Stop shopping at Wal-Mart. Just stop. You don't need their cheap goods that fall apart two days after you bring them home, and it feels good to know that you make a difference by not supporting slavery. Enjoy!


4/5 This Should Not be Discounted
  by !Edwin C. Pauzer (New York City)
Right from the start, you get the impression of a family's impending doom. They have run a successful business for a generation and have been members of their community for several more. The juggernaut Walmart is about to move into the area. The viewer wonders, but knows what will befall the family business.

As the producer points out, this has occurred all over America where Walmart has set up shop, demanded more services from the county treasury, and ran local stores into bankruptcy, destroying main streets everywhere. If the Wallmart is not profitable, it will be shut down. It will leave a vacant building and parking lot and a shuttered main street like the parasite that has sucked the life out of its host.

Robert Greenwald also focuses on the Walmart employees who are forced to work long hours sans overtime, health care, or union protection. On this last one, in particular, Walmart fights tooth and nail with a rapid response force of lawyers that will descend on the wayward employees the same day the news reaching them. (When Walmart butchers successfully unionized in Wisconsin, the company closed down the butcher shops in those stores.)

Many employees are paid so poorly that they cannot afford the cost of health coverage the company provides. They get public assistance and must apply for food stamps. Ironically, Wallmart touts their wonderful health plan that would cost many of their employess almost half their salary.

The odd part of this documentary was seeing Walmart's CEO addressing a crowd of enthusiastic Wallmart employees extolling Walmart's exemplary employee treatment. It had more of the look of an Amway convention where individual achievement is encouraged. And that is about all that Walmart is willing to offer them. Their contributions to employees and charities is such a shamefully low amount, you come away with the feeling that the Walmart family heirs still own their first dime.

When confronted with a Walmart-resistant community, they may resort to underhanded telephone surveys or barraging opponent's phone lines. For this they will spare no expense.

If Greenwald's purpose was to steer me away from Walmart, he succeeded. I have no wish to profit from someone else's misery. You too may want to say "No Sale" to shopping at Walmart.

The price is just too high.



5/5 Tell Your Friends To Watch This Movie!
  by DW (Texas)
A powerful documentary that contrasts the public persona of Walmart with the human toll of their behind-the-scenes business practices. Deeply personal vignettes from small business owners, Walmart managers, workers, attorneys and environmentalists review the tragic consequences of one of the world's largest, most venal corporations running amok on rural America - subsidized by our own tax dollars. This is a movie was Walmart does NOT want you to see - so tell all your friends!

5/5 What Sam Walton Hath Wrought
  by Steve Koss (New York, NY United States)
Everyone knows the story: WalMart waltzes into a small to medium-sized town, promises jobs and better shopping opportunities for everyone, secures tons of tax concessions, opens to great fanfare among local politicians and property developers, and within a year turns the former downtown area into a wasteland of shuttered buildings and ruined family businesses. But how many people know about the following:

-- That WalMart managers keep lists of places Associates could go for public assistance. As one employee was told, "There are lots of programs out there. Use your taxpayers' dollars!" The movie estimates that it costs American taxpayers over $1.5 billion every year to support WalMart employees.
-- That five Walton family members are in the top ten of America's richest people but give less than 1% of their wealth to charity (Bill Gates has given 58%) but over $3.2 million in political contributions in 2004 alone (one guess as to which political party).
-- That the moment the first union in a WalMart Canada store was certified, the company closed the store, claiming it was not profitable.
-- That the moment the tax abatements expired for their store in Cathedral City, CA, WalMart relocated it two miles away, just beyond the city line.
-- That there were over 27 million square feet of abandoned WalMart store space around the U.S.
-- That WalMart knew as early as 1994 from internal studies that 80% of their store crime occurred in the parking lots but has done virtually nothing to make their customers safe and, in fact, tried to hide from the courts that they had even done these studies.
-- That store managers are taught how to log onto the WalMart system under false ID's in order to change employees' reported hours so that no overtime would be paid, and that WalMart settled a law suit for $50 million for unpaid overtime in Colorado alone, and that WalMart faces similar work hour and overtime law suits in 31 states.

As Robert Greenwald's new DVD, WALMART: THE HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE (HCLP) shows in stunningly personal detail, these are just some of the real truths about WalMart, a company that preys on communities and individual lives for the sake of their profits and shareholders. Greenwald's documentary makes it abundantly clear that those shareholders are not likely to be WalMart employees - those individuals can barely afford to feed their families, let alone share in their employer's success through WalMart's stock.

Greenwald points out in one of the DVD's special features that he set out originally to build his documentary around the experiences of a single current employee. He found many who would talk to him off camera, but no one who would "go public" out of fear. As a result, he opted to tell many smaller stories of past and current employees (including management level people), small business owners whose family businesses were bankrupted by WalMart, community action groups who have fought WalMart, and even a customer who was assaulted in one of WalMart's unprotected parking lots. Not only do these "little people" stories give the documentary a human face, they also present a starkly contrasting reality to various segments of "corporate speak" from Lee Scott, the company's president.

Perhaps the defining moment in WALMART: HCLP comes from the experiences of Edith Arana, a black woman who worked for the company in Oxnard, CA for six years and was repeatedly praised as a future management candidate. When the day came that she asked about her future, she was told there was no place for "people like her" in WalMart management. "What do you mean, people like me?" she asked. "Do you mean because I'm a woman, or because I'm black?" "Well, two out of two ain't bad," was the reply.

WALMART: THE HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE tells a story of corporate inhumanity, of blatant disregard for the law, the environment, civil rights, worker's rights, women's rights, and the rights and welfare of its own employees. Critics will argue that Greenwald's story is one-sided, but how else will we hear the side that can't spend millions on advertising, PR, lobbying, and lawyers? Watch this movie with your teenaged children. Encourage your high schools to have teachers show this movie (and perhaps THE CORPORATION, as well) and have the students discuss the enormous human cost from predatory and soulless profit-seeking for its own sake. Do we really want a job as a WalMart sales associate to become our country's new definition of the American working class dream?

4/5 Biased, indeed, but worth checking out
  by Manny Hernandez (Bay Area, CA)
I have never been a huge fan of Wal-Mart, I admit, but I came to this documentary with a lot of curiosity and willingness to see what else I could find out about them. Most of the elements presented were fairly well known and public, so there wasn't much new I picked up from it.

The point of view offered was clearly biased, portraying in a negative light every aspect of how Wal-Mart conducts business. Not to say that they are saints (I feel they aren't an example of corporate social responsibility), but as the movie neared the end, it seemed the director was after any negative argument he could make, without even granting them that they make a difference to the lives of millions who are able to afford their shopping thanks to their low prices.

That said, the point of the documentary is indeed on detailing the side consequences that Wal-Mart's low costs bring about to society at large. They negatively impact the lives of underpaid/uninsured associates and taxpayers at large who end up being affected by subsidies Wal-Mart obtains and the burden they indirectly pose on the system by having so many of their associates rely on government programs for health, food and housing. By pushing to bankruptcy many local small businesses, they typically become the largest employers in the markets where they arrive, leaving low-income workers with little option if they want to stay in their towns.

Not having read much about Sam Walton's original vision, I can imagine him not being cool with the way things have turned with the business he founded. Greed brings out bad things, indeed...