Rethinking Walmart?
Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 21:01 I haven’t willingly walked into a Walmart since … uh, let’s see. I bought a couple table lamps at the one in Fulton, Missouri back in 1973. Their notorious dealings with labor - particularly women employees - kept me out of their stores, as did the general dislike for what a WalMart could do to a small town’s once thriving core.
However. It seems that with sheer size, there can occasionally come some good. The Director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Michael F. Jacobsen, makes an interesting case on Huffington Post for WalMart and the health of the nation.
-maven
Walmart doesn’t exactly conjure up warm and fuzzy feelings among many of us who call ourselves progressives. Though the company’s huge footprint in the marketplace means consumers can pay lower prices for clothing, electronics, and increasingly, food — it has also resulted in the shuttering of many family businesses. Much of small-town America’s commerce has shifted from its once thriving, quaint downtowns to hangar-like Super Centers, with their vast parking lots. And the company’s labor record also leaves something to be desired.
But the same marketplace muscle that the chain uses to “rollback” prices can also be harnessed in other ways. For instance, Walmart helped spur dramatic changes in the market for laundry detergent, requiring that its suppliers switch to concentrated liquids, thereby conserving energy and reducing solid waste. Similarly, Walmart is working to make its stores more energy efficient, doubling the efficiency of its truck fleet, and requiring its suppliers to likewise reduce their environmental footprint.
