The History of The Globalizer

Wal-Mart originally began in the early 1960s with a man named Sam Walton in Arkansas. He started his first Wal-Mart store in 1962 in Rogers, Arkansa, and never looked back. According to an article by Richard Freeman, "By 1969, Wal-Mart had grown to $30.8 million in annual sales," and obviously taking inflation into consideration, that is a lot of money.

This was just the beginning of what I like to refer to as, "The Takeover."

In 1983, (I skipped the 70s because it was basically a bunch more Wal-Marts popping up everywhere across the United States), Walton opened the first Sam's Club.

By 1985, just 20 years after they started, Wal-Mart's annual sales reached an astonishing $8.4 billion.

Fast forward to 2008, where Wal-Mart operates more than 3000 stores around the globe, and Sam's Club has near 700 stores; still carrying their everyday low prices, while at the same time moving up the corporation ladder. How do they do it one might ask? How are there prices continuing to lower but their business continuing to boom? The answer is easy, one world almost, it is whether you choose to believe it or not. Exploitation!

This exploitation is not only of its own country's economy and people, but exploitation on a global level; exploitation that has Wal-Mart wiping out 1.5 Million manufacturing jobs here, and instead paying sweatshop workers extremely low wages and making them work long hours to mass produce merchandise that will be sold in Wal-Mart for (YUP, YOU GUESSED IT!) Wal-Mart's EVERYDAY LOW PRICES!

Not only are the sweatshop workers getting paid incredibly low wages to do extremely back breaking production work, but the people who actually work in the different Supercenters across the globe get paid almost 30% less than those working at comparable unionized jobs.

O ya, that is one thing I almost forgot; not only does Wal-Mart have all these ridiculous, anti-employee strategies, but one of their main policies is NO UNIONS! So, if you and a few others do feel like you are getting mistreated in the workplace, there is absolutely NO WAY for you to cause an uprise within the company via a union (which almost every other major retail/discount grocery store has). Talk about a dictatorship!

Not only is Wal-Mart using the global market as a way to exploit people across the globe as well as in its home country, but it is taking a huge toll on women as well. Whether it is the women in the sweatshop (90% of sweatshop workers are women), or the women working within the company itself, the strategy of the company seems to be emasculated to the point that besides Walton's family, there is a staggering percentage of women in management positions, and countless numbers of cases where women have tried and tried (with the best qualifications) to get management positions and have been denied and denied.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Globalizer, but I do not think we are quite ready for a Titanic sort of move, so we'll deal with what's underneath later. Get educated about the world around you, don't get caught up in the oblivion!

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2004/3103waltons.html

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Introduction

So, I am going to be doing my blog on the effects that globalization has had on Wal-Mart as well as vice versa, and how both have shaped and are shaped by societal thinking about race, class, gender, etc. I am going to talk about all kinds of issues that are clouded by the beast of Wal-Mart, including issues of human rights, gender inequality, and racial inequality.

In today's globaized world, we are faced with the difficult task of making money while at the same time respecting morals, and from what we see in the capitalistic world, we as a society are having a hard time balancing the two. Not only is this the case, but the outlying factors that create this lack of morality are not even justified with facts, and this can be related to the class.

I hope to find out not only how much "the business model" comes to be the driving force in people's lives, but how Wal-Mart is still killin' the game, even though the morality behind their practices is zero to none.

http://www.probe.org/site/c.fdKEIMNsEoG/b.4218005/k.783A/Globalization_and_the_WalMart_Effect.htm

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