The Pros And Cons Of Walmart

Walmart can be summed up in the phrase “everything that is wrong with America.” It is anti-employee, racist, and degrades the environment. In fact, that is why many of my social-justice-minded friends refuse to support them. Walmart is the 23rd largest economy in the world, larger than the vast majority of countries. I, as an optimist about humanity, would like to believe Walmart is a force for good in the world, so I did some research hoping that the bad reputation was inflated. As I expected some good accompanied the bad, but these were both dwarfed by the ugly.

Novelist Chimamanda Adichie states in her Ted Talk that the danger of a single story about a person or country is that we risk a critical misunderstanding. Perhaps no organization/country/person is entirely evil. It’s far to easy to pull a George W. Bush and call …show more content…
Perhaps that is because it’s so embarrassing that we allow a corporation to get away with such atrocities. Walmart created a PAC to donate to political campaigns. The self-proclaimed philanthropic corporation donated millions to politicians, and 95% of those politicians voted against raising the minimum wage. Since the 2010 Citizen’s United ruling this is our ugly reality. Corporations like Walmart can influence politics to further edge out competition by favoring big business. These corporations will only grow under this system and increase their profit exponentially. The ugly reality, that we refuse to acknowledge the gravity of, is that Walmart is no longer an anomaly. Big business is pushing out competition in every sector of our economy. We’ve made concession to big business and sacrificed local economies in the process. This has contributed to the disappearance of the middle class. By supporting big business we’ve created a larger customer base for them. The “Walmartafication” of America is not going anywhere while we allow corporations to be movers and shakers in our political