Strategic Research Report: Wal-Mart Stores, Inc (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Impacts of Wal-Mart: The Rise and Consequences of the World's Dominant Retailer
Annual Review of Sociology, 2009
Wal-Mart has been both praised and pilloried as a template for twenty-first century capitalism. Therein lies the challenge in analyzing the world's largest retailer. We examine the sociological impact of Wal-Mart in terms of four themes: its business model and organizational structure, the dual impact of Wal-Mart's labor relations in terms of its own stores and working conditions in its
Wal-Mart In The Global Retail Market: Its Growth And Challenges
Journal of Business Case Studies, 2007
The Wal-Mart Corporation is one of those companies that have been impacted by change at all levels as they conduct business and expand their operations throughout the globe. Wal-Mart has also greatly benefited from deeply-held universal values, philosophies, and management practices which have made them successful in diverse countries. In a short span of about forty years, this company has become the envy of any and every major corporation in the world. This case presents how Wal-Mart has achieved this enormous success, its best practice in the global retail industry, international growth trends and challenges, and various lessons that have been learned from their expansion in foreign countries. The case focuses on customer value delivery related to low prices, use of technology, and an organizational culture passionate on continuous learning.
A 58-year-old Wal-Mart employee set himself on fire Thursday night outside the west suburban store where he worked and later died of his injuries. "I can't take it anymore," the man told a police officer on the scene, said Randy Sater, a watch commander with the Bloomingdale Police Department. "People tried to help this guy but he didn't want any part of it," Sater said. "His motive was he wanted to die. It's just tragic… Sater said this incident was something that was going to stay with witnesses for a long time." I can't even put it into words for somebody taking their life in this fashion," he said. "The pain, it's just incredible." To the men and women who own men and women we will not forgive you for wasting our bodies and time Leonard Cohen, The Energy of Slaves
Wal-Mart: The panopticon of time
At a moment when the future of global capitalism seems altogether uncertain, we want to take another look at Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation. Despite its importance to the American and global economy, surprisingly little critical scholarship has emerged on the “Beast from Bentonville.” In this working-paper we suggest that we can understand Wal-Mart as both a unique instance as well as a telling example of tendencies within the process of planetary social transformation that has come to be known as globalization. In particular, Wal-Mart strives to become what we will call a “panopticon of time”: a particularly acute and emblematic crystallization of social, economic and technological forces which express a new constellation of power under globalizing capitalism. Wal- Mart represents among the most advanced consolidations of corporate, financial, technological and managerial technologies which employees afford it unprecedented control over consumers, employees, sub-contractors, communities and even nations, as well as unprecedented profit. We argue its power stems in part from its ability to hinge various modes of power: the local and the global, spectacle and surveillance, the private and the public, the everyday and the exceptional. And it is driven as much by the need to intervene in the production of subjects and the shaping of networks as the need to generate profit; indeed, these two imperatives have become inseparable. Wal-Mart is a symptom and an agent of the depotentiation of time under corporate globalization, the confinement or incarceration of temporality within the neoliberal webs of technology, commerce and management. We begin by reviewing the case of Wal-Mart’s financial, managerial and logistic power. Next, we take up extant criticisms of Wal-Mart which we argue tend to fail to fully apprehend and sufficiently contend the qualitatively new form of global power the firm represents. In order to better chart this new power, we then turn to some less commented-on aspects of the dispositif or assemblage of historically specific power relations Wal-Mart represents including its informatics empire, its network ontology, and its mobilization of finance, health, spectacle and security to become a pivotal intervention in both global flows and everyday life. It is for this reason that, finally, we advance an argument that Wal-Mart is a panopticon of time which brings together multiple technologies of power to define a new architecture of control over temporality, a complex machine whose purpose is to imprison human potential in multiple overlapping ways.
Organizing Wal-Mart's Logistics Workers
New Labor Forum, 2005
WAL-MART IS A GLOBAL CORPORATION, PURCHASING ESTABLISHED CHAIN STORES AND opening new stores in multiple countries. By the end of 2004, it had opened its highly recognizable giant stores in Argentina (11), Brazil (145), Canada (240), China (40), Germany (92), South Korea (16), Mexico (664), Puerto Rico (54), and the United Kingdom (272), and had a 38 percent interest in a Japanese retailer. Of its total sales, 18.5 percent came from international operations. In some countries, Wal-Mart has faced opposition and losses, as its own distinctive corporate culture has clashed with local customs. But Wal-Mart's executives are ready to learn from their mistakes and no one can doubt that the company will continue to expand, both in the countries where it already has a foothold, and into many other countries around the globe. But Wal-Mart is a global corporation in another sense. Giant retailers like Wal-Mart are no longer simply the outlets for the goods produced by other companies. Rather, they exercise increasing control over their suppliers, shaping every aspect of their production and distribution, including their pricing and their labor practices. Although their stores and sales operations are the most visible aspect of the company to the public, there is a whole underbelly of procurement and logistics that rarely receives the same notice. In the United States, for example, keen attention has been paid by unions to the negative affects of the company 68 • New Labor Forum E. Bonacich and J. B. Wilson on their own sales labor force, on the (sometimes unionized) sales labor force of their competitors, and on the communities in which they are located. Political struggles have been fought and sometimes won to stop the expansion of the stores. But these struggles are limited relative to the impact that Wal-Mart is having on production workers here and around the world. Wal-Mart is the largest importer to the United States. This does not just mean that its suppliers are importing and then sending these imported goods to Wal-Mart for sale, though this certainly happens. Wal-Mart also imports huge amounts of goods itself to the United States, having established its own procurement facilities in a number of countries. Currently, Wal-Mart maintains 110 major distribution centers throughout the globe. In 2003, Wal-Mart was by far the largest importer of ocean containers (the major method of importing manufactured consumer products) in the nation, bringing in 471,600 TEUs (20-foot equivalent units, the standard measure of containers), almost twice the number of Home Depot, ranked second, and Target, ranked third (Journal of Commerce 8/16/04). Each filled 20-foot container weighs around 15 tons, meaning that Wal-Mart imported over seven million tons of consumer products by ocean carrier in 2003. The labor standards that Wal-Mart influences, therefore, are not restricted to those of its own direct employees or the employees of its retail competitors. It also critically affects the labor standards of the employees of the producers that supply the wares it sells, and the transportation and warehouse workers who distribute the goods to its stores, even though these workers are not direct employees of Wal-Mart. The labor impacted by Wal-Mart consists of three major components: sales workers, production workers, and distribution (logistics) workers. These three sets of workers are all both domestic and global. Thus, the labor regime which Wal-Mart governs is imperial in scope.
Wal-Mart's Power Trajectory: A Contribution to the Political Economy of the Firm
Review of Capital as Power, 2014
This article offers a power theory of value analysis of Wal-Mart’s contested expansion in the retail business. More specifically, it draws on, and develops, some aspects of the capital as power framework so as to provide the first clear quantitative explication of the company’s power trajectory to date. After rapid growth in the first four decades of its existence, the power of Wal-Mart appears to be flat-lining relative to dominant capital as a whole. The major problems for Wal-Mart lie in the fact that its green-field growth is running into barriers, while its cost cutting measures seem to be approaching a floor. The article contends that these problems are in part born out of resistance that Wal-Mart is experiencing at multiple social scales. The case of Wal-Mart may tell us about the wider limits of corporate power within contemporary capitalism; and the research methods outlined here may be of use to scholars seeking to conduct political-economic research on the pecuniary trajectories of other major firms.
Precarious Work in the Walmart Global Value Chain
This report presents new research on violations of international labour standards in Walmart garment supplier factories. Information was collected through interviews and focus group discussions including 344 workers engaged in Walmart supply chains in Bangladesh, Cambodia and India; and an in-depth case study, spanning 8 months, of working conditions in an Indonesian Walmart supplier employing 3,800 Indonesian contract workers. These findings, collected between December 2012 and May 2016, are situated in context of both previous studies on Walmart supply chains and the broader context of the global production network.