Wal-Mart

Sorry, it's been a while. This semester has seemed to run away with all of my free time, and I'm just now getting to the "interesting articles" pile beside my bed. The first one I'd like to talk about is more of a tangent off of another article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/business/11shipping.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=wal-mart&st=cse

On November 11, the New York Times featured an article about Wal-Mart initiating an aggressive move: offering free shipping on all online purchases. This might be fine for such a huge corporation, but this may mean hard times for smaller companies who rely on shipping costs to help them stay in the black. Being forced to lower or cut out shipping costs can mean failure for many online companies.

Regardless of the implications this move has on fair business practices (but I'm not a business major, so it might be fair to force other businesses into the ground, I don't know), I'd like to talk about Wal-Mart's business practices in general. I honestly can't think of how what Wal-Mart does is ethical. They buy goods at lower-than-market price overseas, which might sound like it would be good for foreign economies, but once the supplier they buy goods from starts raising the prices on them, Wal-Mart turns to another competitor that needs their business so badly that they are willing to sell for exorbitantly low prices:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/

Closer to home, we all know how the introduction of a Wal-Mart to a community spells death for other small businesses in the area. While shoppers might like to shop at a store they know is local, tight budgets and low bank accounts force buyers to go to where they can get the best prices: Wal-Mart.

I'm not saying that people who can't afford to buy their items elsewhere are under the obligation to avoid Wal-Mart, and I'm not saying that I haven't bought from them myself, being a low-income college student. But I think that maybe we should try more to go to other stores. For example, while H-E-B isn't that small of a store, it at least guarantees that it's goods are more local, and their prices are fairly competitive with those of Wal-Mart's.