Forget about the guy at the grocery store using food stamps to buy lobster. Walmart, the world’s largest retail company, is even more dependent on government welfare so it can make jaw-droppingly obscene profits. In fact, government handouts are the main reason Walmart is so profitable, and the billion-dollar corporation’s business model is centered around the continued dependence on social safety net programs. Walmart’s welfare abuse is costing taxpayers billions of dollars per year. It’s time to get them off the government teat and make them start paying their own way. Paying Workers Poverty Wages When Walmart pays its workers so little that they need food stamps to survive, they’re also investing in a steady profit stream. Even though their prices are roughly the same or even more than their local competition, Walmart’s excessive marketing of “low prices” makes them a first-choice supermarket for people living in poverty, including their employees. Its 1.4 million employees alone account for a huge revenue source for Walmart, as the company is the largest private-sector employer in the US. Employee wages are so low that during the last holiday season, one Walmart in Ohio held a food drive for its own employees so they could have a decent Thanksgiving dinner. This video of Walmart workers sharing their own stories in time for last year’s Black Friday protests included footage of one worker talking about how other workers often had to loan each other money so they could pay their bills on time. Walmart’s insistence on paying its workers so little is especially despicable, given that the company could pay workers much more without even changing any of its prices. The think tank Demos crunched the numbers and found out that if Walmart simply stopped spending billions every year on buying back its own stock to drive up the value of stock options owned by executives, it could pay workers an average of $14.89 per hour without increasing prices by a cent.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 20:49:15 +0000
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