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Essay on Wal-Mart Stores and the Food Retail Industry
Background of the company: Wal-Mart was founded by Sam Walton in 1962. It is the largest retailer in the world and was formerly the largest corporation in the world based on revenue for 2004. In 2006 it was overtaken by three of the global oil majors due to high oil prices. Wal-Mart's impact is hotly debated. Specific areas of controversy include the company's product origins, treatment of employees and suppliers, environmental policies, extraction of public subsidies (corporate welfare), availability of prescription contraceptives at Wal-Mart pharmacy counters, and store impacts on local communities and businesses.
Supercenters are extremely large stores that sell a wide variety of products. They are differentiated from more traditional shopping outlets that often specialize in a specific category: supermarkets specialize in selling food, although they carry other products, while a supercenter will sell food, clothing, prescription drugs, clothing, home office supplies, and electronic equipment. These supercenters are new outlets within a given geographic market defined by household shopping patterns. They originally began in the southern and southwestern areas of the US.4 Over the past few years they have spread to the central U.S. and they are now attempting to move into the northeast and west coast areas of the U.S. (Zweibach, Elliot. 2004)However, they have encountered problems in entering markets in these areas, with the restrictions often created by zoning ordinances.By far the largest and most controversial of these supercenter outlets is Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart typically encounters significant opposition from competing outlets and from labor unions, who often represent workers in these competing outlets.5 Wal-Mart charges significantly lower prices than traditional outlets. The traditional outlets typically respond to Wal-Mart entry by decreasing their prices and attempting to reduce wages and benefits to their unionized workforce. Thus, neither competitive outlets nor their unionized workforces favor Wal-Mart entry. Indeed, from late 2003 to early 2004....
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