Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price

Filmmaker Robert Greenwald has effectively made mincemeat of his targets in a couple of recent fiery documentaries - Rupert Murdoch and the FOX Network in "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism", and the Bush administration in "Uncovered: The War on Iraq". His latest is no exception as he lays into Wal-Mart, its CEO Lee Scott and Sam Walton's heirs in this probing 2005 critique of corporate injustice. Instead of providing a single narrative voice, Greenwald structures his film as a series of vignettes focusing on discrete instances of where Wal-Mart has violated fair market practices, passed over women and minorities for leadership positions, restricted movements toward employee unionization, taken advantage of cheap labor in China and India, and disregarded environmental standards.

The grievances seem endless, and the film even discloses the embarrassingly paltry amounts each Walton family member has given to charitable causes (compared to Bill Gates, of course). The most touching episodes focus on victims like Red Esry, who are experiencing the closure of their multi-generational small businesses in small towns where Wal-Mart opens and cannibalizes the competition. Much of the treatment seems ham-fisted, especially in the juxtaposition of Wal-Mart commercials and in-house training videos within the context of those being crushed by the corporation's economic clout. Moreover, the one segment about the rape of an employee in a parking lot, while horrific, seems more generic in nature than Wal-Mart's accountability in the incident. The abundance of conjecture and the lack of attributable facts tend to affect some of the film's credibility.

However, Greenwald makes his points with clarity. Especially effective is the use of archived footage of Scott asserting to a massive audience of his employees that Wal-Mart has done nothing but good for the economy, even though many of them have to go on welfare to get medical care. The film ends with a montage of people who have successfully lobbied against the construction of stores in their towns. At the same time, Greenwald has not made a monomaniacal diatribe, as the takeaway never feels like the destruction of Wal-Mart but more a call for a severe overhaul of their internal practices. The filmmaker has certainly come a long way since his 1980 feature film debut, the ludicrous "Xanadu", and he seems to be continuing his streak of confronting those corrupted by their power.

The DVD has several extras, the best being a twenty-minute making-of featurette and a separate 16-minute short, "The Big Meeting", on how the film came about. Greenwald also provides a commentary track, though much of what he shares can be gleaned from the featurettes. There are a couple of deleted segments that do seem redundant if they were included in the movie (one set in Quebec, the other in England), as well as a brief clip of local religious leaders condemning Wal-Mart's practices. Lastly, there are several fitfully funny Wal-Mart commercial parodies that apparently served as commercials for the documentary. Those looking for a more-in-depth analysis of Wal-Mart's business impact may want to read Charles Fishman's "The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy".

I saw this tonight in a screening at our local community college with the producer present. It was a huge, standing room only crowd, and it was clearly a hit with the viewers. Producer Robert Greenwald uses an interesting device of running a rah-rah speech of WalMart's CEO at a company meeting, with the CEO bragging about all of WalMart's great policies towards employees, the environment, customers, etc., alternated with clips of dozens of ordinary people testifying to quite the opposite. The stories of small town businesspeople having to close their family stores were especially poignant, as well as the interviews with exploited overseas workers in Walmart's sweatshops. Even one of the company's plant inspectors said he just cried when he went back to his hotel after his first inspection.

Full of astounding facts about the true costs of WalMart, the over two billion dollars it has cost US taxpayers in subsidies, welfare programs for underpaid employees, etc. It became very clear that, whether or not you shop there, it's costing you money, money that's going right into the pockets of the Walton family. It's costing all of us our way of life.

Quite an eyeopener. I, for one, plan to never patronize WalMart again.

Trust me, I work there; they have---if you can believe it---gotten WORSE for the workers. They recently (within the last 2 months) changed our dress code---no hats (not so bad), everybody has to wear a blue clone shirt (a little bit worse), no more vests (so we have find other ways to carry the tools required for our job), and, just a couple days ago, no radios on the floor, which have been allowed ever since I started working there over 2 years ago. Also, within the last 2 months (this is the worst), they have decided we need to be to be timed on how long long it takes the stockers to work their freight. I mean, c'mon already, this is WAL_MART---not Ford Motor Company!!! If you want me to do piece work, then pay me piece work rate, not less than $10 an hour. Yup, Wal*Mart's lowering prices, alright---lowering the price they pay their employees (oops, sorry---ASSOCIATES).

Robert Greenwald, a hard-hitting political activist documentary filmmaker ("Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War"), comes out swinging in this incisive exploration of the retail marketing behemoth.

This film is the perfect sequel to Micha X. Peled's documentary, "Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town," shown on PBS in 2001. That film focused on a single community, Ashland, Virginia, showing the strategies Wal-Mart used to buy its way in, essentially bribing the town council, strapped for cash for urgently needed civic projects, and the extensive though in the end ineffectual efforts of townspeople to stop the building of a W-M superstore in their town. Two of the worst blights caused by Wal-Mart, unfair labor practices and the killing off of long established small businesses that had been the backbone of the community, are highlighted.

Greenwald picks up where "Store Wars" left off, looking at other worrisome aspects of the Wal-Mart movement through a broader, nationwide lens. We learn that because staff wages and benefits are so pitifully meager, thousands upon thousands of Wal-Mart employees in numerous states qualify for and regularly receive benefits from public assistance programs, even as they work. What's worse, Wal-Mart capitalizes on this phenomenon in the most cynical possible manner. As a matter of company policy, stores offer detailed advice to employees on how to access government benefits! We taxpayers are shouldering the financial burden Wal-Mart shirks: like employees, we too are unwitting pawns in a master corporate strategy.

Meanwhile, we see proof that Wal-Mart - after exacting multi-year tax concessions as part of sweetheart deals some communities make to attract stores (the opposite of the situation that was described in Ashland, Virginia) - will actually relocate a store to land barely outside the town boundaries just before tax breaks are scheduled to end, leaving a useless hulking shell of a building and zero local tax obligations behind them forever.

We learn about Wal-Mart's approach to unionization efforts. There is a specialized managerial swat team based at W-M headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. When news arrives that significant union organizing activity has begun at a particular store, the following day the union-busters are dispatched in a company Lear jet. The local store manager is reassigned and one of the team takes over. The others work to identify union activists and arrange for their swift dismissal. We also get more evidence, in case anybody needs it, about unfair labor practices. W-M defines full time employment as 28 hours/week, and often forces employees to work "off the clock" to get tasks achieved without providing any overtime pay.

We also learn about the cavalier stance W-M has on crime. Millions are spent on in-store video monitoring to prevent theft of goods. But it's a different story out in the vast and often poorly lit Wal-Mart parking lots. Here, nationwide, huge numbers of assaults, robberies, rapes and other crimes take place. Guess how much W-M spends for parking lot surveillance? You're right: nada, even when pushed and after agreeing to pay for regular patrols of lots, which make a huge positive difference, W-M often drags its feet in implementing reforms.

This film, like other Greenwald films, is skillfully crafted. He shows us a lot of talking heads, but not the usual suspects, i.e., the experts. Instead the heads are those of small business owners, their spouses, families and employees. And former Wal-Mart employees, including some who had held key managerial positions for nearly 20 years, real former insiders. We meet these people on their own turf. The wife of one businessman talks to us in her kitchen, ironing clothes all the while. It is a highly viewer-friendly approach to interviews.

We also get statistics, usually in small, digestible batches, but sometimes in large amounts presented too rapidly to fully take in. A problem with a number of the interviewees' assertions and other material presented as factual is the lack of corroboration or presentation of other viewpoints. But this is in the nature and tradition of propagandistic documentaries. Such films rarely tell "THE" truth; rather, they tell "A" truth, a particular slant on important matters, what filmmaker Werner Herzog has called "ecstatic truth," or essential truth.

Greenwald has taken a grass-roots approach to distributing this film. Rather than seek out conventional big screens, he arranged for an Internet approach to recruitment of individuals and groups to host DVD screenings in a huge variety of settings, all in the same week. Churches, NGOs, university campus venues, some theaters, you name it. My wife and I saw the film at a private home in our area along with 10 other people, all arranged via the film's website.

As long as consumers think only of their own bottom line – buying everything they want at the absolute lowest price every time, never connecting the dots between low price, lousy service, substandard employment conditions, financial drains on the public sector, and the loss of fondly recalled small businesses - Wal-Mart will continue to eat away at our culture, parasitically suck away on our national nutrient resources, all the while building up its corporate treasures into a war chest to combat any and all challenges to its destructive excesses. There's no end in sight. My rating: 7.5/10 (low B+). (Seen on 11/18/05). If you'd like to read more of my reviews, send me a message for directions to my websites.

if you have concerns about the corporate structure and its inherently psychopathic nature (profit at any cost), this movie should pretty well confirm your suspicions and make us all realize that if this system plays itself out to its logical end, it is not going to be a pretty picture....unless, of course, your name is Walton and you have your own personal underground nuclear shelter/compound. Either the corporate world will beat us all into submission or the next great revolution will take place against it... it will of course be up to us all to decide which. A nice compliment to this movie would be the Corporation, which really delves further into the issues of the nature of corporations and how they have become the exact opposite of what they were intended to do in the first place, which was to serve the PUBLIC good.