15 replies to this topic

[diogenes227]

I swear, the evil that is Wal-Mart is so staggering it's practically beyond imagining...

Wal-Mart asks its workers to donate to its needy workers so they can give thanks at Thanksgiving

A Cleveland Wal-Mart store is holding a food drive — for its own employees.

Meanwhile, in a contrast to the town-destroying, employee-bashing, blight-producing, pure-greed world of Wal-Mart there is its competitor, Costco:

11 REASONS TO LOVE COSTCO THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH SHOPPING THERE

By Kevin Short Posted: 11/19/2013 11:32 am EST | Updated: 11/20/2013 11:21 am EST

It's not just the bulk toilet paper and $1.50 hot dog combos. There's more going on here.

1. The company pays a living wage. Costco's CEO and president, Craig Jelinek, has publicly endorsed raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, and he takes that to heart. The company's starting pay is $11.50 per hour, and the average employee wage is $21 per hour, not including overtime. Most other big box retailers start their employees at minimum wage.

2. Workers get benefits. About 88 percent of Costco employees have company-sponsored health insurance, according to David Sherwood, Costco's Director of Financial Planning and Investor Relations. "I just think people need to make a living wage with health benefits,” Jelinek told Bloomberg. “It also puts more money back into the economy and creates a healthier country. It’s really that simple.”

3. The CEO makes a reasonable salary. Costco's CEO makes far less than most executives, with a total compensation package of about $4.83 million in 2012. In contrast, Walmart CEO Mike Duke made roughly $19.3 million during the same year. Walmart's CEO earns as much as 796 average employees, according to CNN Money, compared to Costco's CEO making 48 times more than the company's median wage.
costco jelinek

4. Costco helped its employees weather the recession. When the economic crisis hit and other retailers laid off workers, Costco's CEO approved a $1.50-an-hour wage increase for many hourly employees, spread out over three years.

5. Costco doesn't kill Thanksgiving. While many of its competitors are forcing employees to work on Thanksgiving Day, Costco will buck the trend and stay closed.

6. It also doesn’t waste money on expensive advertising. The company doesn't advertise nor does it hire a public relations staff. Meanwhile, Walmart dropped $1.89 billion on ads in 2011.

7. Its prices aren't horrendously high. Costco never marks up products by more than 15 percent, while most retailers commonly mark products up by more than 25 percent.

8. It embraces equality. Costco scored extremely well (90/100) on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index, an assessment of LGBT policies in the workplace.

9. It hires from the inside. More than 70 percent of its warehouse managers began their careers working the register or the floor.

10. Costco's employees are loyal. For employees that have worked at the company for more than one year, the annual turnover rate is below six percent, according to Sherwood. For executives, the turnover rate is less than one percent.

11. Free samples. Need we say more?

And one more reason to grow on, another blue-line special -- its stock:



Not every company is out to gut the American middle class and greedily exploit the opportunities provided by greatness of this country. Some, like Wal-Mart, just choose to do so.

“A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.”

Isn't it time to quit feeding the mean dog?

[*JB*]

I swear, the evil that is Wal-Mart is so staggering it's practically beyond imagining...

Wal-Mart asks its workers to donate to its needy workers so they can give thanks at Thanksgiving

A Cleveland Wal-Mart store is holding a food drive — for its own employees.

Meanwhile, in a contrast to the town-destroying, employee-bashing, blight-producing, pure-greed world of Wal-Mart there is its competitor, Costco:

11 REASONS TO LOVE COSTCO THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH SHOPPING THERE

Try and find a COSTCO anywhere near a poor area, unlike Walmarts, they do NOT exist.

It's interesting that you pick a battle to fight that no one has an issue with -- EXCEPT -- that your attack is prompted by a voluntary effort at a place people choose to work at -- at the pay offered. I don't shop at Walmarts because they are lousy stores. I do know that if many communities didn't have a Walmart, 100s of people would not have any job -- and --- they would have to buy their food at TRIPLE price small stores who gouge their own community.

VERY few supermarkets operate in these areas because of shoplifting destroying profits. Walmart is the only reason the poor can shop for food and make their money/food stamps go a lot further. Where I grew up in SE Washington D.C. had 5 supermarkets, now there are NONE -- plus no more drug stores, gas stations, family restaurants either.

Read the arguments by the community leaders -- and the polls of the people that live there -- in Washington DC supporting bringing Walmarts -- without raising their base starting pay -- in this years battle to locate three Walmarts in DC.

Would I support Walmart, et al, paying much higher wages higher wages, of course -- except that -- I KNOW the poor would suffer especially with 2 million less working age people employed FULL TIME. Percentage wise, Blacks are even MUCH worse off with jobs opportunities of ANY kind. IF you get the numbers together and do some math, Walmart makes a profit of about $4.00 per employee hour. IOW, prices would go up. The people most hurt would be the poor, fewer sales, fewer jobs, etc.

Some things to consider.

There is always more to "it". Only simple minds make simple judgements.

[diogenes227]

For those who think, there's much to think about in this article.

ASHEVILLE DOWNTOWN DEALS WITH THE "ECONOMIC CANCER" ON OUR CITIES, AND THRIVES

But for those who merely want to look there's a map that pretty much says it all...simply.

By investing in downtowns rather than dispersal, cities can boost jobs and local tax revenues while spending less on far-flung infrastructure and services. In Asheville, North Carolina, Public Interest Projects found that a six- story mixed-use building produced more than thirteen times the tax revenue and twelve times the jobs per acre of land than the Walmart on the edge of town. (Walmart retail tax based in national average for Walmart stores.) (Scott Keck, with data from Joe Minicozzi / Public Interest Projects)

By paying attention to the relationship between land, distance, scale, and cash flow—in other words, by building more connected, complex places—the city regained its soul and its good health.

Yes, there is always more to "it" if one can get beyond the usual Wal-Mart propaganda points and the post-1980 voodoo-economics bubble.

Edited by diogenes227, 22 November 2013 - 02:01 AM.

[stocks]

More Walmart Propaganda

DC Walmart More Selective than Harvard

The District of Columbia's first Walmart store has received over 23,000 job applications for only 600 jobs, Business Insider reported on Tuesday. That means that one out of every 38 applicants will be offered a position with the store, or about 2.6 percent. Harvard University, one of the most selective colleges in the United States, has an acceptance rate of 6.1 percent.

DC's first Walmart almost didn't happen. The D.C. Council had proposed a "living wage" bill that would require a minimum wage of $12.50 per hour for all "large" retailers with annual corporate sales that exceed $1 billion. This would have effectively shut out Walmart from the city. The bill was vetoed by D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray and minimum wage in the city remains at $8.50.



http://townhall.com/...arvard-n1749399

[diogenes227]

More Walmart Propaganda

DC Walmart More Selective than Harvard

The District of Columbia's first Walmart store has received over 23,000 job applications for only 600 jobs, Business Insider reported on Tuesday. That means that one out of every 38 applicants will be offered a position with the store, or about 2.6 percent. Harvard University, one of the most selective colleges in the United States, has an acceptance rate of 6.1 percent.

DC's first Walmart almost didn't happen. The D.C. Council had proposed a "living wage" bill that would require a minimum wage of $12.50 per hour for all "large" retailers with annual corporate sales that exceed $1 billion. This would have effectively shut out Walmart from the city. The bill was vetoed by D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray and minimum wage in the city remains at $8.50.



http://townhall.com/...arvard-n1749399

Yes, another sad tale. People are so desperate for jobs, any jobs (thanks to the endless gutting of the American middle class since the 1970s and systematically since 1980), this happens. And of course, those Wal-Marts will kill every small retail and mom-and-pop local business in the area, but no one will probably keep a tally of the local small-business jobs lost but given the numbers in the Asheville study, it will likely be 600 times more than ten. And all of those salaries (and probably some benefits since at least some small businesses, unlike Wal-Mart, actually care about their people) will be extracted from the local economy so they will not any longer compound in circulation. And if DC ever wants to change the game on this economic predator, Wal-Mart, like it does frequently in towns in the Midwest, will simply pick up and move out to another spot, leaving its workforce in the lurch, more desperate than ever, and leaving a big swath of blight which even the city will not be able to clean up because Wal-Mart will not let any competitors move in (Wal-Mart's empty-store-empty-parking-lot blight, as far too communities all across the country have discovered, appears to be built into the company's end-game business plan).

Yes, another sad tale. The DC mayor is a fool.

But thanks for pointing out that in America now one has less chance of getting a minimum wage job at a crappy place like Wal-Mart than a chance of getting into Harvard. What a telling number that is! Are you actually thinking that is a number to be proud of?! Those job applicants have long since left the middle class because corporations like Wal-Mart have in the last 30 years ripped the middle class from them. And that, me thinks, that is way beyond sad -- it is so pathetic it's hard to imagine we'll ever get out of this national economic death spiral.

On a positive note for a Friday, however, this kind of gutting is a hell of an argument for a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage.

Edited by diogenes227, 22 November 2013 - 11:43 AM.

[stocks]

Black Friday union strikes against Walmart likely to fizzle

Justin Wilson, managing director of the pro-business Center for Union Facts, says reporters predicting widespread walkouts and parking lot chaos are being played.

“The emperor has no clothes here,” he told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview. “This is not even a strike, it’s a picket. And it’s a picket by union leaders, not Walmart employees.”

The “widespread, massive strikes and protests” targeting Walmart on Black Friday will almost certainly fall flat, says one union watchdog closely monitoring the labor group planning the pickets.

OUR Walmart, a close affiliate of the massive United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), is threatening the big-box chain with crippling strikes and angry crowds during next week’s crucial Black Friday sale unless the company raises worker wages.



Read more: http://dailycaller.c.../#ixzz2lZZw4Kzm