Who Is Walmart Good Or Bad For America?

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Walmart is the world’s largest retailer and corporation netting $482.13 billion in 2016 alone (amigobulls.com). One of the most highly debated topics nowadays is whether Walmart is good or bad for the American economy and the nation as a whole. This has been a highly debated topic ever since Walmart revolutionized the retail game by becoming the largest retailer in the world, thanks to their strategic marketing and low prices. Overall, Walmart definitely does more bad than good for our economy in that their business practices have created problems with jobs, local businesses, wages, taxes, and the environment.
According to one viewpoint, Walmart has improved America’s standards of living with lower costs for consumers, greater employment
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Walmart implements a quick fix by lowering the prices of goods, but they are not getting to the root of the problem. By implicating a quick fix, they manage to skip out on the infraction and never fully address and eliminate the problem. The problem is that 44 million Americans today live in poverty (Blodget). In actuality, what Walmart is doing is covering up all the negative business practices they have imposed on the U.S. economy with their rock-bottom pricing. Being in the position to beat out their competitors by offering the lowest prices around on food and necessities does not absolve Walmart of their shady ways of doing business. Walmart has succeeded in abolishing countless small businesses throughout the U.S., and will continue to abolish them. Small businesses are what made the U.S. the superpower it is today, and we are witnessing the dissipation of this entrepreneur business model. Walmart makes an astonishing $14.7 billion dollars a year in profit, which would make Walmart the 12th largest country in the world if it were a country. A typical Walmart employee earns $22,137 over the course of a year (Gerencer). The is completely inexplicable because surely a company earning over $14 billion dollars a year easily can pay their employees a decent wage as well as funding them with a heath care plan. It is extremely difficult for a human being to survive on $22,137 a year, especially when some of these people have families they need to support. Because they cannot afford to purchase medical insurance and are forced to apply for government assistance, this burden falls back on the American tax payers. This is a perfect example of how Walmart conceals a major wrong they are inflicting on our economy while they continue to grow richer by not doing the right thing for their workers. In 2005 Walmart agreed to become a

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