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There's another reason to bash WalMart and that is the way they treat their employees, especially women. An 1800's mentality, slave wages, compulsory overtime without pay, discrimination in advancing women which has brought them a host of suits. Oh, bit by bit they are conceding here and there but a good portion of the savings one makes at WalMart is on the backs and underpaid sweat of its employees.

Gothamgirl: You seem to have no clue what Walmart wages are, they are 40% HIGHER than the USA minimum wage. I do not see YOU complaining that MCDONALDS and all its ilk, who really pays minimum wage which is 40% LOWER than WALMART Wages, mistreats THEIR Employees.

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PS nobody FORCED anybody to work for Walmart, K-Mart or even minimum wage McDonalds. And in today's economy, making 40% over minimum wage by working as a "Walmart Greeter" (ie standing there and doing NOTHING, not even giving directions as to where everything is in the vast store) is a really peachy job!!!!

I don't shop at K-Mart or WalMart and I buy U.S. made products whenever I can. If I have to pay more for it I will. It generally IS better quality. I've gotten burned on quite a few "Made in China" products. I was fortunate, however, and didn't lose any pets like some did to Chinese crap. Most of us who are older remember the quality of products when they were all made here.

Like many, many, people on small fixed incomes I shop at Walmart (I never buy meat there because they spay some red gel preservative on it). But, enough about Wal-Mart.....

K-Mart was the industry leader in mistreating employees. They figured out how to screw employees out of benefits by having them only work part-time, so they stopped hiring full-time employees whenever possible. Next, they started harassing older full-time employees to get them to retire. Then they replaced those with part-timers. Now, the reason that I know that this is true is because it happened to my mother. She was in personnel at a large store, and became one of the team that opened new stores in the Midwest. When that ended she went back to her original store. Within a month, they moved her to the night checkout manager job where she has to stand for eight hours (she was already over 65), and she retired.

K-Mart also touted their 'non-discrimination' policy of hiring women into their management program. Then, they did everything they could, legally, to get them to leave, and most did. They would schedule the women for all the bad work shifts, and schedule the management 'team' meetings on the women trainees' days off so that they never got one.

Nordstrom's made their department assistant managers (they appointed several per department) come in early to check out the department before the store opened, and catch up on any paperwork from the previous evening; they made them do this 'off the clock'.

You don't have to be Wal-mart to pay lower wages or treat employees unfairly, although I'm not sure Wal-mart even does that more than anybody else. You also don't have to be a genius to work there, but you do have to agree to it.

You can't have it both ways; you can't complain about Wal-mart or other low-end retailers and then continue to shop there. If you don't shop there, you are in the minority. In this economy, shopping at Wal-mart is a great option for low income families; don't see it going away any time soon.

Stores in general are lousy places to work. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part they limit employee hours so they don't have to pay benefits. I can't tell you how many I saw with Medicaid when I worked at a major medical center because they're part time, low wage with no benefits. Some stores expect ALL employees to be available 24/7 and come in to work if called last minute. We had a grocery store strike here a few years ago and one of the results was a tiered wage system where newer employees got substantially lower wages. Guess what happened to the older more expensive employees.

In the long run, with many products you save money buying American made products because they last longer when it's durable goods. With food or health products I won't risk the adverse effects of Chinese products or some of the other countries that don't have our standards - especially with respect to pesticides and farm worker conditions (read mandatory outhouses). And yes, I know some of the e-coli outbreaks were from California grown spinach. The problem has since been corrected and I thoroughly wash all produce. I spend a lot of time reading labels or doing research.

"Low cost means low quality. Cheap is made cheap."

No it does not! There is little correlation! Low cost items are sold at very high prices, your sneakers cost $1 to make but you pay$25, $50 or more! Thanks to the middlemen.

Or look at cars. I owned $15k Honda Accords (a 1990 I had until 2008 and 137.5k hard driven miles until I donated it to charity, fully running, and I have seen $45k or more Cadillacs whose quality was far, far inferior, not to mention their reliability! Same with Jaguars, even more so!

Stores offer IDENTICAL products at widely different prices, for example WHole Foods and Mejier will sell you the exact same packaged product, WF at $4 and Mejier for $2 on sale!

It isn't the price of the product, WI, it's the quality. I've been at this a few years and there is a noticeable difference when it's made in some countries. Black & Decker products used to be top of the line and would last. They moved their manufacturing to China and the quality has gone to crap, but they charge the same prices as before. That's just one of many examples I can give you.

I had a conversation with someone recently about Wallmart, I honestly believe they serve a very good value for those on fixed or limited incomes.

Gothamgal: they can't force overtime without compensation, State labor laws prohibit such behavior. It could be that they are part time employees and the mandated overtime is under 40 hours which would prompt labor laws to be enforced. Like Wellinformed said, no one is forced to work there.

I also agree with Mich insofar as KMart, there was a piece on 60 Minutes about them a number of years ago where people who were very close to retirement were fired....a common practice of Kmarts. I was surprised to hear they filed Chapter 11 when they bought Sears.

If ya find yourself working in a large retail corporation you are simply a very small cog in a huge machine. The observations made by others hold true no matter what the name of the corp. One thing though that is just wrong with Walmart is they are continually referring to their employees as 'family'. This pseudo loyalty is supposed to make the employees feel it's OK they're being abused. While employees qualify for medicaid the CEO makes 25 + million$. I would like to see the figures showing Walmart pays any more than they absolutely have to by law. They don't.

Something else that gets up my nose about Walmart is they will by some cheap land on the margin of a little town, build a mega store then pretty soon are the only store in town as they with their market buying power undercut and send family businesses out of business. Walmart seldom advertises. There goes the local newspaper down the girgler. The business district in the little town I grew up in is now a ghost town. More empty buildings than solvent ones. Where once there was a shoe store, a jewelry shop, a 5 and 10 are now shops with boarded up windows. It today resembles something out of the Twilight Zone.