Originally Posted by
stick47
From an email:
Pt 1
1. Americans spend $36,000,000 at Wal-Mart Every hour of every day.
2. This works out to $20,928 profit every minute!
3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick's Day (March 17th) than Target sells all year.
4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target + Sears + Costco + K-Mart combined.
5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people and is the largest private Employer, and most speak English.
6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the World.
7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger & Safeway combined, and keep in mind they did this in only
15 years.
8. During this same period, 31 supermarket chains sought bankruptcy.
9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the world.
10. Wal-Mart has approx 3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are Super Centers; this is 1,000 more than it had 5 Years ago.
11. This year 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur At a Wal-Mart store. (Earth's population is approximately 6.5 Billion.)
12. 90% of all Americans live within 15 miles of a Wal-Mart.
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Pt 2
In California, the families of Wal-Mart employees use an estimated 40% more in publicly funded health care than the average for families of employees at other large retail firms, according to an August 2003 study by University of California, Berkeley's Institute for Industrial Relations. Providing health care to Wal-Mart families costs California taxpayers an estimated $32 million annually.
Thanks to their poverty-level wages, Wal-Mart workers are often eligible for other kinds of government assistance as well. The same study found that California Wal-Mart employees and their families utilize an additional $54 million in non-health related federal assistance, including food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, subsidized school lunches, and subsidized housing.
The Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce estimated the breakdown of costs for one 200-employee Wal-Mart store:
* $36,000 a year for free or reduced school lunches, assuming that 50 families of employees qualify.
* $42,000 a year for Section 8 rental assistance, assuming that 3% of the store employees qualify.
* $125,000 a year for federal tax credits and deductions for low-income families, assuming that 50 employees are heads of households with a child, and 50 employees are married with two children.
* $108,000 a year for the additional federal contribution to state children's health insurance programs, assuming
that 30 employees with an average of two children qualify.
* $100,000 a year for additional Title I expenses, assuming 50 families with two children qualify.
* $9,750 a year for the additional costs of low-income energy assistance.
Overall, the committee estimates that one 200-person Wal-Mart store may result in an excess cost of $420,750 a year for federal taxpayers.
The effects of Wal-Mart's free-loader policies radiate beyond Wal-Mart itself; Wal-Mart employees are not the only victims. Firms large and small are forced to cut their own costs in order to compete, creating a "race to the bottom, in which everyone suffers," according to the AFL-CIO report. Employers that provide adequate pay and benefits to their employees are under pressure from companies like Wal-Mart that do not. The result: a growing low-wage sector and ever-greater need for government benefits (funded, incidentally, by an increasingly regressive tax structure).
As an economic power, Wal-Mart is in a class by itself, with over $8 billion in net income last year-it's about five times the size of the second-largest retailer in the United States. Wal-Mart's sheer size means it can drag whole sectors with millions of workers both in the United States and abroad down its low-road path. Taxpayers are feeding this giant corporate monster, and at a very high price.
Walmart Factoids, In 2 parts
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