Walmart

Walmart (originally Wal-Mart) is an international department store franchise and the world’s largest corporate retail establishment. With roots dating to 1962, when founder Sam Walton opened a small variety store in Arkansas, by early 2024 Walmart had more than 4,600 stores in the United States alone. Another approximately 5,400 Walmarts existed outside the United States in countries such as Canada, Mexico, South Africa, India, and China. (The first Walmart outside the United States opened in Mexico in 1991.) In fiscal year 2024, the Walmart corporation grossed consolidated revenue of more than $648 billion. By that point, the corporation was employing approximately 2.1 million workers—known as associates—across the world, and around 255 million customers shopped there each week. Walmart associates are easily recognized by their blue vests or blue polo shirt uniforms. The company became known for the motto “Always low prices. Always.”

Overview

Despite its financial success and international proliferation, Walmart and its business practices have generated controversy and divided public opinion. Supporters praise Walmart’s sales of needed household items and groceries at relatively low prices, while critics condemn the corporation’s generally low wages paid to employees and its tendency, as a big-box retailer, to put small, community-based stores out of business.

Various objections to Walmart’s labor practices have been voiced in both the United States and in other nations. Criticism of the company’s policies is the subject of the 2005 documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Walmart proudly promoted its company’s commitment to sell products that had been manufactured in the United States, thus protecting American jobs. However, by the 2000s, critics had noted that Walmart had largely dropped its “Made in the USA” theme in favor of selling lower-priced foreign-made products.

A principal criticism is the company’s allegedly low wages paid and lack of benefits provided to employees. A leaked internal document from the corporation, obtained by the Huffington Post in September 2013, revealed that the starting base pay for many Walmart employees was approximately $8.00 per hour in the United States, with the average pay raise for employees hovering between 20 and 40 cents per hour. The company has heavily discouraged its employees from unionizing, a continuation of Sam Walton’s well-known dislike for labor unions. Walmart executives claimed that the document referred specifically to employee wages at Walmart’s members-only sister store, Sam’s Club. However, various Walmart employees publicly declared that they were paid similar wages.

As a result, Walmart is often the subject of intense social and political debates pertaining to capitalistic practices and ethical treatment of workers. In early June 2014, employees at Walmart stores in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami, among others, announced plans to form picket lines outside their respective stores and go on strike. Walmart’s corporate representatives discounted their striking employees by claiming that the strikers represented a small, disgruntled few who did not speak for the majority of the company’s associates. Another major criticism of the company pertains to its long history of allegedly “invading” smaller towns and communities, establishing stores, and thereby driving small, family-owned and -operated mom-and-pop stores (often perceived as pillars of their respective communities) out of business because they were unable to compete financially with a multibillion-dollar global corporation.

Since Walmart is a much larger retailer with thousands of stores in its franchise and a huge operating budget, it is able to purchase merchandise from wholesalers in larger bulks, which typically results in a bulk discount from the wholesaler. Small, independent-owned stores lack the financial means to purchase in large bulk, and therefore must sell their goods at higher prices. Walton himself strongly opposed such criticism of his corporation during his lifetime by referring to the transition from mom-and-pop stores to large-scale, corporate retailers as an inevitable social change.

Defenders of Walmart point to the company’s national and international successes and regard Sam Walton as an embodiment of the American Dream. The company’s supporters dismiss allegations of low wages and meager benefits by noting that Walmart provides far more jobs and employment opportunities for persons in many communities across the United States and other nations on a level that the smaller stores they displaced could never have matched. Defenders of Walmart also point out that its generally lower prices saves customers money, which increases the amount of disposable income they have for other items. In 2015, after continuing to face pressure from labor unions, the company committed to raising the wage of entry-level employees to at least nine dollars before also announcing an increase in starting wages for several thousand department managers. In 2018, the company boasted on its website that, in the United States, it had promoted 200,000 employees in 2017 and that 75 percent of its store management began in hourly associate positions.

In an attempt to compete with online retailer Amazon and boost its internet sales, Walmart began to introduce a new shipping program in the summer of 2015. The service, titled Shipping Pass, would allow customers to take advantage of free three-day shipping for a full year at an annual fee of fifty dollars. However, critics were skeptical about the potential of the program to attract shoppers willing to pay this amount to save on shipping and noted that, at least initially, the number of items available for the deal was significantly less than those covered under Amazon’s Prime service. Though Walmart ended the Shipping Pass program around 2017, shortly after, it had implemented a two-day free shipping program applied to a greater number of products but with a minimum purchase amount of thirty-five dollars.

In early 2018, Walmart made headlines by announcing it would raise its minimum wage throughout the United States to $11.00 per hour. The company claimed the move was directly related to the controversial tax cut bill passed by Republican lawmakers, which provided large savings to major corporations. Walmart also announced it would provide one-time cash bonuses for some employees and expand benefits programs such as maternity leave. In a separate move, the company said it planned to close over sixty of its Sam’s Club wholesale locations throughout the country. The company also made headlines in February 2018 when, after a mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, it announced that it would stop selling firearms and ammunition to customers under twenty-one and would remove assault-style rifles from its website. It had previously stopped selling semi-automatic weapons, in 2015, as well as high-capacity magazines.

On August 3, 2019, a gunman killed twenty-two people inside a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in the deadliest shooting in Walmart’s history. Just days after the El Paso shooting, a twenty-year-old man wearing body armor filmed himself as he walked into a Walmart in Springfield, Missouri, while carrying loaded guns. The man, who was arrested and charged with a felony for making a terrorist threat, stated that he was testing Walmart’s open carry policy, which at the time allowed firearms to be carried within stores as long as doing so was legal locally.

In September 2019, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon announced that the company would discontinue sales of ammunition for handguns and short-barrel rifle ammunition, and that its stores in Alaska would stop selling handguns, having already discontinued handgun sales in every other state in the mid-1990s. Furthermore, McMillon asked customers to refrain from openly carrying firearms in its stores unless they were authorized law enforcement officers. Some gun control advocates hailed the policy changes, but others argued that they did not go far enough, as Walmart continued to sell hunting rifles and ammunition. Some gun enthusiasts and the National Rifle Association decried the company’s new policies. Other critics wondered whether the policies would help reduce the number of guns available on the street.

Outside of getting caught up, along with other large companies, in gun violence debates, by the early 2020s Walmart had also attracted negative attention for products appearing for purchase in stores that were meant to have the new federal holiday of Juneteenth as their theme. While many criticized the decision to dedicate pints of ice cream, marketed under its Great Value brand, to alleged commemoration of Juneteenth, there were also reports of anger and offense on behalf of some customers regarding other items with Juneteenth and African themes for sale such as clothing and party decorations. The company ultimately responded to accusations of cultural appropriation and insensitivity by halting any more sales of such products. However, the incident prompted larger discussions around racial equity, particularly concerning corporations.

Remaining under scrutiny, Walmart earned praise for once again raising the minimum wage for its employees, first in 2021 to $12 and then in 2023 to $14. At the same time, some commentators noted that these moves were likely tied to the ongoing impacts that the COVID-19 pandemic had on the labor market, forcing many companies to rethink recruitment and retention policies. Like other large retailers, Walmart also remained at the center of legal challenges. In November 2022, the company, accused of playing a role in the nationwide opioid crisis as the operator of in-store pharmacies, announced that it had agreed to a settlement of $3.1 billion to address multiple lawsuits. Though the company did not admit to any wrongdoing, by early 2024 Walmart had also agreed to pay a total of $45 million to settle a lawsuit tied to its sales of weighted goods that included some fruit as well as meats. A customer had filed the suit in 2022 under allegations that company deception meant that many shoppers had overpaid for such products.

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