A Closer Look at Walmart

By Hootsbuddy

Jotman picked up a story not widely told. 

Walmart has copied two of the group's signature cookies, Thin Mints and Tagalongs, and will soon sell them nationally at lower prices -- sure to cut into the do-gooders' profits, which are generated solely from cookie sales.

That's one creepy company. I sincerely hope people stop shopping there.

 
The original source furnishes a delightful string of links,

Apparently, Walmart wasn't satisfied with being the top media-manipulating, union-busting, soul-sucking, Nazi cake-decorating crappy-Chinese-products selling store in America. Now it's preying on Girl Scouts. Walmart has copied two of the group's signature cookies, Thin Mints and Tagalongs, and will soon sell them nationally at lower prices -- sure to cut into the do-gooders' profits, which are generated solely from cookie sales.

Here is my own personal favorite Walmart Story from Fast Company

In the years since Mariotti [former president of the company] left Huffy, the bike maker's relationship
with Wal-Mart has been vital (though Huffy Corp. has lost money in
three out of the last five years). It is the number-three seller of
bikes in the United States. And Wal-Mart is the number-one retailer of
bikes. But here's one last statistic about bicycles: Roughly 98% are
now imported from places such as China, Mexico, and Taiwan. Huffy made
its last bike in the United States in 1999.

That's the sad ending for one of the story's litany of ways that Walmart uses it's power in the marketplace to crush the life out of smaller retailers and their own suppliers. 

But this snip from a Rolling Stone piece takes the cake.

...the nation�s biggest employers of unskilled labor often leave workers having to feed from the public trough. In 2004, a year in which Wal-Mart reported $9.1 billion in profits, the retailer�s California employees collected $86 million in public assistance, according to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley. Other studies have revealed widespread use of publicly funded health care by Wal-Mart employees in numerous states. In 2004, Democratic staffers of the House education and workforce committee calculated that each 200-employee Wal-Mart store costs taxpayers an average of more than $400,000 a year, based on entitlements ranging from energy-assistance grants to Medicaid to food stamps to WIC�the federal program that provides food to low-income women with children.

These little factoids deserve a place in the raging insurance and health care reform debate, but I doubt they will be heard in the roar of the crowd.

Here's another thought.

Forty-six million uninsured Americans may not be as costly to insure as the CBO and others imagine. I don't know how their projection models are designed, but I bet they don't take items like this last one into account. People sixty-five and over are not part of the challenge. They are already taken care of. So, too, are children qualified for CHIPS.

The uninsured may not cost as much to care for as others. Taking out the young and the old, what remains is a group of strong, basically healthy people whose health care needs may not be as great as projected.