Wal-Mart may seem like a blessing to the common person, with their low prices, extensive inventory, and “all-over-the-place” convenience, but what the common person fails to see if the negative impact Wal-Mart has upon other businesses and ultimately, themselves. Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart originally wanted to the company to be a morally oriented company in the little town of Betonville, Arkansas devoted to providing low prices for the people. Walton explored the idea of selling items at lower prices, drop profit margin, but in exchange, increase the volume of sales. Counter to such wishes, after the being fed to the corporate world, investors, lobbyists and moguls have mutated his original company into a facility of financial and retail terrorism waging price wars that plummet other businesses down the tubes. Sam Walton would never believe his store chain is now the place were yearly on Black Friday, people suffer traumatic injuries rushing to get the cheapest electronic goods made by cheap child labor across seas.

“Always Low Prices” is Wal-Mart’s slogan and quite frankly, they keep that promise pretty well. After all, where else would you find people trampling each other to death rushing to buy a $20 DVD player that only Wal-Mart can offer at such a fantastic price? Unfortunately, the general American Society has been plagued into the philosophy of trying to get the “most bang for your buck” and the side effects of such a disease is allowing such companies like Wal-Mart to not only exist but to thrive.

So the benefits of a Wal-Mart is good prices? What other benefits are there of the 4.2 acre blue piggy bank rooted downtown? Well no Wal-Mart can be complete without discrimination, tax-evasion, privacy infiltration, bribery, and sedition. After all, these are the aspects of a powerful and successful company right? Success and power is one thing. Being morally correct in business practices is another. Being the U.S. of A’s largest company, Wal-Mart coincidentally faces the largest workplace-bias lawsuit in U.S. history. This basically means Wal-Mart has been discriminating against women, African-Americans, the handicapped and others for years. What people fail to see these days is that lawsuits cannot be pushed through without a crime committed. The media and government markets Wal-Mart’s actions as “law-suits”. They fail to reveal or to even state that Wal-Mart is in fact, not just being sued, but committing a crime. This multi-billion dollar company has to resort to felony for the advancement of its sales. Isn’t there a point where this should stop? Is it not the responsibility, as described by Locke and borrowed by Jefferson, that when an establishment is oppressing the people, the people must rise against such an establishment and overthrow it and remove it from power? But how do people stop such a rampaging economic machine? Well first of all you need to prevent it from growing further. If the majority of people in a community all vote against the establishment of a “money vacuum”, than so be it. Listen to the people. Another problem is how Wal-Mart with its infinite monetary resources is able to bribe legislature and officials to bend to Wal-Mart’s will. Wal-Mart is exploiting human weakness of greed to defy the opinion of the majority.

So the fight to stop the Wal-Mart from entering your town failed. Your representatives may have just been a bit too cheery over that million-dollar deposit or perhaps the loopholes in the law just happened to be tunnels which a mammoth can travel through. Either way, the pulsating establishment has rooted itself in your town and is now leeching funds from your city. Lets look at the side effects the parasite causes.

The first issue that will arise is competition. Wal-Mart featuring its unholy low prices will be driving small businesses and even bigger businesses to the pavement. Unlike the many small businesses where the profits of the company stay in the relative area and gets redistributed, Wal-Mart’s profits gets funneled into Betonville and Wall-Street which can be thousands of miles away from the community in which the funds originated. This is how Wal-Mart acts like a monetary drain, taking away the local financial assets and shipping them off to work for Corporate America. Not only does it drain money directly from the pockets of the townspeople, the people themselves are than faced with a tax burden of supporting such a large enterprise in their neighborhood. So would small businesses want this corporate giant in their backyard? I don’t think so unless their goal is to be driven out of business. How can a small business survive when a Wal-Mart enters their town? That’s a good question and many small businesses are shouting this in despair. Honestly, how can they survive? Sure they can begin specializing their products and suit a specific customer base but a majority of small companies like small electronic retailers and convenience stores just can’t compete. That story about “Fred’s Supermarket”, a local small store that thrived when a big franchise business moved in is just ONE case. How about a news article gets written on all the companies that don’t survive when a local big franchise business stumbles down. There probably isn’t enough journalists in the world to write them all.

So now that Wal-Mart has being exploiting your townspeople what do you do? Well one of the most classic ways of handling such big businesses is with collective bargaining via unionization. Wal-Mart employees across the world are complaining of unpaid wages, discrimination, fees and charges, and health benefit lies. Wal-Mart realizes their employees are weak and their voices faint. Even if its evident that the employees should be unionized for their own protection, for the sake of Wal-Mart’s bank account, Wal-Mart strives to maintain a non-collective workforce able to bend to it’s will. 

With a staggering $1.177 trillion dollars in sales in 2002, can anyone deny the fact that Wal-Mart has an impact on the economy, a system based on the transfer of money? According to a Pennsylvania State report on the economic impact of Wal-Mart:

"[t]he public costs that [Wal-Mart] imposes by raising the poverty rate suggest that public infrastructure subsidies may not be warranted." [Stephan J. Goetz, Hema Swaminathan, "Wal-Mart and County-Wide Poverty," Social Science Quarterly, 6/06]

Wal-Mart in its infinite wealth is increasing it’s own bank account  in exchange by robbing the common people’s, burying them deeper into poverty. In addition to adding to the national poverty rate, Wal-Mart also has the ability to determine the livelihood of suppliers. With such a large market base, if Wal-Mart takes a product of their shelves, the supplier of the product takes a major loss and sometimes even has to go out of business. Because of their powerful influence, Wal-Mart is now also able to control prices and threaten suppliers if they don’t want to sell their goods at a specified prices. These suppliers are from all across the country, from China to Korea to Germany to New Zealand. Wal-Mart’s roots drain funds from across the world on a global scale. It fuels the demand for manufacturers and not just that, is not expanding it businesses overseas to sell goods at “Always Low Prices”, burdening foreign cities and towns. 

In a pure definition, Wal-Mart does not meet the qualities of a full-all-out monopoly, but at the rate it is increasing, it is making very good headway. There still exists competitors like Target and other small and large super-market businesses as well as government regulations and restrictions on it’s expansion. If it was a pure monopoly, Wal-Mart would be able to control prices how they like and with no competition at all and with it’s widening selection of products, it would mean Wal-Mart would have to have a monopoly on essentially all retail goods, which at the moment, Wal-Mart still has not attained. Even though monopolies are illegalized by Roosevelt during the progressive era, Wal-Mart still has the chance of bribing the government enough to break such an anti-trust tradition.