Customer Reviews

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price [VHS]

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'Wal Mart, The High Cost Of Low Price' is filled with first hand testimonials and some hard-fact figures that will help in validating your hatred of this greedy giant, and visually exposes those in other countries who are ruthlessly used as slaves to produce the cheap products you purchase when you patronize this monolith.

These "jobs" provided to the labor forces of India, China, Bangladesh, and Mexico are not 'good wage' jobs even for third world standards. The people are overworked, underpaid, and forced to work in sub-human conditions. These human beings make 13 to 17 cents and hour, and work 10 to 18 hour days without breaks, all so you can have that $1.49 blouse.

Exposed in this film are the squalid, rent controlled apartments in China, provided by the company, that put to shame the most rancid ghetto house in your hometown. And if the employee chooses not to live in these rat-infested housing developments, the rent is still deducted from their wages. Wal-Mart has managed to lower the work standards set for these hard-pressed, low wage, third-world countries that other companies are going to follow, sucking down the standards of working all across the world.

The manager of the Mexico factories went on a tour to make sure that working conditions were humane. He was fired when he reported that the conditions were intolerably inhumane. In his own words, he didn't think retaliation would be brought against him for doing his job.

If you think it was a good thing that America abolished slavery, then think again before you go into a Wal-Mart. Just because the US is no longer "importing" slaves, doesn't make it right to continue to use slavery in other countries to produce high profits for personal gain. Wal-Mart's practices are no different than bringing slaves over from Africa to pick our cotton, it's still a cheap way for the rich to get richer at the expense of human blood and sweat.

Intermittently inserted in the film is a speech made by Lee Scott to the high-end employees and stockholders of Wal-Mart, which sounds very much like an Amway pep-talk. Lee Scott's earnings for 2005 were $27,207,799.00. The average Wal-Mart hourly employee's was $13,861.00.

Interesting facts: After 9/11, the Walton's built themselves an underground bunker in case of another terrorist attack, costing millions of dollars that should have went into paying back the Government for having to subsidize their employee's un-affordable medical benefits.
The Walton family gave less than 1% of their wealth to charity. Bill Gates, not even a nice man himself, gave 58%.
The "Critical Need" fund, set up to assist Wal-Mart employees in emergencies, received five million dollars from Wal-Mart employees (making $13,861.00 annually) and only $6,000.00 from the Walton family, who made, collectively, 102 billion.
Wal-Mart actually had a commercial campaign about "buying American" while all their products come from sweatshops overseas.

Wal-Mart has refused to address crime statistics that show an upswing of violent crime in their large, remote, under-lit and un-protected parking lots, putting their customers in danger and taxing the local law enforcement. The State of California alone paid out 80 Million dollars in medical benefits to poverty-level Wal-Mart employees because the 102 Billion Dollar Walton family does not want to give their "associates" fair medical benefits.

There are many ways to hate Wal-Mart and its ilk, and many books out on the subject, but I recommend watching this DVD so you can actually see the slave workers and conditions overseas that these selfish billionaires exploit without passing down their profit to the "small people" who helped build their empire. The presentation could have used a little more snappiness, and the DVD starts out very slow, but keep watching and you will eventually see the monster peeking out from behind your curtain.
Stop shopping at Wal-Mart. Just stop. You don't need their cheap goods that fall apart two days after you bring them home, and it feels good to know that you make a difference by not supporting slavery. Enjoy!

Right from the start, you get the impression of a family's impending doom. They have run a successful business for a generation and have been members of their community for several more. The juggernaut Walmart is about to move into the area. The viewer wonders, but knows what will befall the family business.

As the producer points out, this has occurred all over America where Walmart has set up shop, demanded more services from the county treasury, and ran local stores into bankruptcy, destroying main streets everywhere. If the Wallmart is not profitable, it will be shut down. It will leave a vacant building and parking lot and a shuttered main street like the parasite that has sucked the life out of its host.

Robert Greenwald also focuses on the Walmart employees who are forced to work long hours sans overtime, health care, or union protection. On this last one, in particular, Walmart fights tooth and nail with a rapid response force of lawyers that will descend on the wayward employees the same day the news reaching them. (When Walmart butchers successfully unionized in Wisconsin, the company closed down the butcher shops in those stores.)

Many employees are paid so poorly that they cannot afford the cost of health coverage the company provides. They get public assistance and must apply for food stamps. Ironically, Wallmart touts their wonderful health plan that would cost many of their employess almost half their salary.

The odd part of this documentary was seeing Walmart's CEO addressing a crowd of enthusiastic Wallmart employees extolling Walmart's exemplary employee treatment. It had more of the look of an Amway convention where individual achievement is encouraged. And that is about all that Walmart is willing to offer them. Their contributions to employees and charities is such a shamefully low amount, you come away with the feeling that the Walmart family heirs still own their first dime.

When confronted with a Walmart-resistant community, they may resort to underhanded telephone surveys or barraging opponent's phone lines. For this they will spare no expense.

If Greenwald's purpose was to steer me away from Walmart, he succeeded. I have no wish to profit from someone else's misery. You too may want to say "No Sale" to shopping at Walmart.

The price is just too high.

A powerful documentary that contrasts the public persona of Walmart with the human toll of their behind-the-scenes business practices. Deeply personal vignettes from small business owners, Walmart managers, workers, attorneys and environmentalists review the tragic consequences of one of the world's largest, most venal corporations running amok on rural America - subsidized by our own tax dollars. This is a movie was Walmart does NOT want you to see - so tell all your friends!

Everyone knows the story: WalMart waltzes into a small to medium-sized town, promises jobs and better shopping opportunities for everyone, secures tons of tax concessions, opens to great fanfare among local politicians and property developers, and within a year turns the former downtown area into a wasteland of shuttered buildings and ruined family businesses. But how many people know about the following:

-- That WalMart managers keep lists of places Associates could go for public assistance. As one employee was told, "There are lots of programs out there. Use your taxpayers' dollars!" The movie estimates that it costs American taxpayers over $1.5 billion every year to support WalMart employees.
-- That five Walton family members are in the top ten of America's richest people but give less than 1% of their wealth to charity (Bill Gates has given 58%) but over $3.2 million in political contributions in 2004 alone (one guess as to which political party).
-- That the moment the first union in a WalMart Canada store was certified, the company closed the store, claiming it was not profitable.
-- That the moment the tax abatements expired for their store in Cathedral City, CA, WalMart relocated it two miles away, just beyond the city line.
-- That there were over 27 million square feet of abandoned WalMart store space around the U.S.
-- That WalMart knew as early as 1994 from internal studies that 80% of their store crime occurred in the parking lots but has done virtually nothing to make their customers safe and, in fact, tried to hide from the courts that they had even done these studies.
-- That store managers are taught how to log onto the WalMart system under false ID's in order to change employees' reported hours so that no overtime would be paid, and that WalMart settled a law suit for $50 million for unpaid overtime in Colorado alone, and that WalMart faces similar work hour and overtime law suits in 31 states.

As Robert Greenwald's new DVD, WALMART: THE HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE (HCLP) shows in stunningly personal detail, these are just some of the real truths about WalMart, a company that preys on communities and individual lives for the sake of their profits and shareholders. Greenwald's documentary makes it abundantly clear that those shareholders are not likely to be WalMart employees - those individuals can barely afford to feed their families, let alone share in their employer's success through WalMart's stock.

Greenwald points out in one of the DVD's special features that he set out originally to build his documentary around the experiences of a single current employee. He found many who would talk to him off camera, but no one who would "go public" out of fear. As a result, he opted to tell many smaller stories of past and current employees (including management level people), small business owners whose family businesses were bankrupted by WalMart, community action groups who have fought WalMart, and even a customer who was assaulted in one of WalMart's unprotected parking lots. Not only do these "little people" stories give the documentary a human face, they also present a starkly contrasting reality to various segments of "corporate speak" from Lee Scott, the company's president.

Perhaps the defining moment in WALMART: HCLP comes from the experiences of Edith Arana, a black woman who worked for the company in Oxnard, CA for six years and was repeatedly praised as a future management candidate. When the day came that she asked about her future, she was told there was no place for "people like her" in WalMart management. "What do you mean, people like me?" she asked. "Do you mean because I'm a woman, or because I'm black?" "Well, two out of two ain't bad," was the reply.

WALMART: THE HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE tells a story of corporate inhumanity, of blatant disregard for the law, the environment, civil rights, worker's rights, women's rights, and the rights and welfare of its own employees. Critics will argue that Greenwald's story is one-sided, but how else will we hear the side that can't spend millions on advertising, PR, lobbying, and lawyers? Watch this movie with your teenaged children. Encourage your high schools to have teachers show this movie (and perhaps THE CORPORATION, as well) and have the students discuss the enormous human cost from predatory and soulless profit-seeking for its own sake. Do we really want a job as a WalMart sales associate to become our country's new definition of the American working class dream?

This was a decent documentary, but not what I hoped to see. I had expected more of a critique of Wal Mart's broader economic policies and its impact on the overall American and World economies. I also would've preferred more of an objective approach, but that's not something you can expect with Greenwald. Instead, this was a film that pulled at your heartstrings and your raw emotions...showing scenarios of individuals "wronged" by Wal Mart. Here we only see one side of the story. Don't get me wrong, I think Wal Mart is an evil corporation that is bad for America. They use unethical and appalling tactics that not only affect communities, their own employees and small business, but more importantly the decaying manufacturing base of the US economy. This angle was better explored on an episode of PBS's FrontLine.

I definitely recommend the FrontLine documentary over this film. The approach is more objective, and their end result is in my opinion a stronger indictment of Wal Mart's policies. Greenwald takes the low road and shows nothing more than individuals who want to voice their grievances against Wal Mart.

WAL-MART: THE HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE is a fantastic documentary about coporate greed and the P.R. facades put on by Wal-mart CEO's to convince people that Wal-mart is run by generous millionares who care about their employees. Being a former Wal-mart associate myself, I found this documentary to be incendiary, challenging and thought-provoking (though I imagine there are Wal-mart associates out there who had the same reaction to this film as some (but not all; in fact, probably not too many) American Republican soldiers had to Michael Moore's masterpiece, FAHRENHEIT 9/11, but that's their loss.)

The film begins with Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott once again proclaiming Wal-mart to be the richest compnay in the galaxy and all of the wealth is being distributed fairly. But it almost seems that the associates of Wal-Mart, the company whose goods are sold by my former employer, etc is actually destroying them. In HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE, every time a new Wal-mart is opened up in a small, rural American town, It is good for the economy. Who's economy? Apparantly not the small, family owned businessess almost immediately shut down by Wal-mart's 'kill em all, let God sort 'em out' approach to dealing with "competition". And when Wal-mart's supplier's must outsource their products to Chinese sweatshops where works make about $3.00 per day to keep up with what Wal-mart is willing to pay, nobody seems to care.

But being that my employment at Wal-mart was brief, I was stunned to hear Store managers confess to have followed orders to cheat asscociates out of overtime. Even more stunning is the revealation that few Wal-mart associates can actually afford Wal-mart's health care plan, and are actually encouraged by Wal-mart to apply for taxpayer-funded public-assistance programs. This coming from the richest compnay in the World????

All that was new to me, but I can state unequivically that when HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE speaks of Wal-marts agressive anti-unionization, it is true. Wal-mart will deny up and down that they are anti-union, but believe me when I tell you that the training videos associates like myself watch almost immediately only tell soon-to-be associates of the cons of unionizing, but leaves out any pro's. Any union activity detected in any Wal-mart is grounds for being fired.

There's much more within HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE, and it's not an entirely grim story. Director Robert Greenwald brings clips of CEO Lee Scott telling blatant lies about Wal-mart's concern for the environment, it's own asscociates, and anything else other than money, and Scott being mocked by the one, the only, JON STEWART!!!!!! But it does have it's darker moments, such as the revealation that Wal-mart is fully aware that the vast majority of it's crimes takes place in it's parking lots, and Wal-mart simply not being willing to paying for security guards and the like outside, even knowing that doing so could almost completly eliminate Wal-mart crimes.

But I encourage all people, including past and present Wal-mart associates to see HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE. We can fight these corporations if we can just see past their lies and combat their greed.

I have never been a huge fan of Wal-Mart, I admit, but I came to this documentary with a lot of curiosity and willingness to see what else I could find out about them. Most of the elements presented were fairly well known and public, so there wasn't much new I picked up from it.

The point of view offered was clearly biased, portraying in a negative light every aspect of how Wal-Mart conducts business. Not to say that they are saints (I feel they aren't an example of corporate social responsibility), but as the movie neared the end, it seemed the director was after any negative argument he could make, without even granting them that they make a difference to the lives of millions who are able to afford their shopping thanks to their low prices.

That said, the point of the documentary is indeed on detailing the side consequences that Wal-Mart's low costs bring about to society at large. They negatively impact the lives of underpaid/uninsured associates and taxpayers at large who end up being affected by subsidies Wal-Mart obtains and the burden they indirectly pose on the system by having so many of their associates rely on government programs for health, food and housing. By pushing to bankruptcy many local small businesses, they typically become the largest employers in the markets where they arrive, leaving low-income workers with little option if they want to stay in their towns.

Not having read much about Sam Walton's original vision, I can imagine him not being cool with the way things have turned with the business he founded. Greed brings out bad things, indeed...

Filmmaker Robert Greenwald has effectively made mincemeat of his targets in a couple of recent fiery documentaries - Rupert Murdoch and the FOX Network in "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism", and the Bush administration in "Uncovered: The War on Iraq". His latest is no exception as he lays into Wal-Mart, its CEO Lee Scott and Sam Walton's heirs in this probing 2005 critique of corporate injustice. Instead of providing a single narrative voice, Greenwald structures his film as a series of vignettes focusing on discrete instances of where Wal-Mart has violated fair market practices, passed over women and minorities for leadership positions, restricted movements toward employee unionization, taken advantage of cheap labor in China and India, and disregarded environmental standards.

The grievances seem endless, and the film even discloses the embarrassingly paltry amounts each Walton family member has given to charitable causes (compared to Bill Gates, of course). The most touching episodes focus on victims like Red Esry, who are experiencing the closure of their multi-generational small businesses in small towns where Wal-Mart opens and cannibalizes the competition. Much of the treatment seems ham-fisted, especially in the juxtaposition of Wal-Mart commercials and in-house training videos within the context of those being crushed by the corporation's economic clout. Moreover, the one segment about the rape of an employee in a parking lot, while horrific, seems more generic in nature than Wal-Mart's accountability in the incident. The abundance of conjecture and the lack of attributable facts tend to affect some of the film's credibility.

However, Greenwald makes his points with clarity. Especially effective is the use of archived footage of Scott asserting to a massive audience of his employees that Wal-Mart has done nothing but good for the economy, even though many of them have to go on welfare to get medical care. The film ends with a montage of people who have successfully lobbied against the construction of stores in their towns. At the same time, Greenwald has not made a monomaniacal diatribe, as the takeaway never feels like the destruction of Wal-Mart but more a call for a severe overhaul of their internal practices. The filmmaker has certainly come a long way since his 1980 feature film debut, the ludicrous "Xanadu", and he seems to be continuing his streak of confronting those corrupted by their power.

The DVD has several extras, the best being a twenty-minute making-of featurette and a separate 16-minute short, "The Big Meeting", on how the film came about. Greenwald also provides a commentary track, though much of what he shares can be gleaned from the featurettes. There are a couple of deleted segments that do seem redundant if they were included in the movie (one set in Quebec, the other in England), as well as a brief clip of local religious leaders condemning Wal-Mart's practices. Lastly, there are several fitfully funny Wal-Mart commercial parodies that apparently served as commercials for the documentary. Those looking for a more-in-depth analysis of Wal-Mart's business impact may want to read Charles Fishman's "The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy".

Wal-Mart only presents a small portion of the über discounters--a result of capitalism. And the ethics and morality are often challenged when the corporation sees their vision with a greedy filter.

Luckily, that we still live in a free country, a free market of thoughts, products, and of course the documentaries.

In this documentary, it shows how Wal-Mart successfully tergiversated how they operate the business and their visions that contradict the testimonials from their employees and social facts. I will stop here--don't want to spoil it.

Is this true that you have to be aggressive to survive a business?
And after watching the documentary, are we going to change our inelastic shopping behavior on cheap price products?
These are all interesting questions for us to think about.

I will admit to having shopped at Wal-Mart in the past. Like most people, the thought of saving one or two bucks on a pair of jeans or the kids' birthday presents was too tempting for me to pass up even though I'd heard rumors of the company's terrible treatment of its employees. The fact is, it just didn't seem real to me until I was confronted with the stories of actual people who'd worked for Wal-Mart - and some who still were employed there.

It was obvious before I even rented this DVD that it was going to be a piece of propaganda against Wal-Mart. The giant meanie-face character smashing through a peaceful suburb on the front cover made that pretty clear from the get go. I assumed that there were some companies with real axes to grind against Wal-Mart, competing retail chains that have been hurt by the heavy competition. It was not such a stretch to imagine such companies backing a film like this in an effort to damage their competitor's profits. How much credibility should one grant the claims and conclusions of such a film?

It's true that Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price does make liberal use of emotional manipulation via interviewing many poor, put-upon employees of WM; stories unfold of wages so low that they cannot afford the company's health care program. They must at times choose between paying for prescriptions and eating. Many full-time WM employees have to turn to public assistance programs like Medicaid. Others talk about the stress of being constantly spied upon though store cameras and managers to ensure that they do not conspire to unionize (suspicion of which is enough for management to find an excuse to fire). Former managers reveal how they were told to profile employees based on how they socialized with others and body language, to determine if they were talking union. They also admitted to understaffing on purpose to cut costs, even though it caused the workers there to finish the job with unpaid overtime. This all painted a condemning picture of a company that just doesn't care about the welfare of its people.

But underneath these sad anecdotes, the case against the retail giant made by this film is backed by several logical arguments. First, that the many WM employees who are forced to use government programs like Medicaid are increasing costs to us, the taxpayers. Second, the unattractive detail that WM buys primarily from China instead of American-made goods. Nice, Wal-Mart! Fits with your "all-American" image. And finally, when the last segment of the film revealed the appalling lack of parking lot security - which accounts for WM nationwide being the sites of more crimes like robberies, rapes and murders than any other store - well, I don't like to shop at a store that cares so little for me, the customer. A selfish motivation on my part of course, but it was the last straw that got to me. Do I trade my safety for low prices? I decided that I didn't need that cheap pair of sweatshop jeans so badly after all.

I realize that there well may be another side to this story that I haven't heard, but until WM does something to A) provide affordable health care for its employees, B), Starts buying American, and C) shows visibly reduced parking lot crime due to increased security, I will be disinclined to hear that other side. The richest retail family in the country could afford to crack open their wallets a bit more.

As a documentary, Wal-Mart; the High Cost of Low Price did an adequate job of presenting its case. It was not thrilling entertainment, but a good way to learn the issues behind the controversy of this successful retail chain.
-Andrea, aka Merribelle