Wal-Mart is the most successful discount retailer in America. Yet
although the company has become synonymous with American success, because
of its relatively inexpensive prices and diversity of goods, it has also
become synonymous in some areas with all that is wrong with American
commerce and workplace relations. This is despite its desired projected
image as a homey' American company, full of Midwestern family values.
This image, combined with urban dweller's greater desire and ease at
shopping at smaller stores exclusively dedicated to the purveying of
specific, rather than general arrays of goods, has made its desired
expansion in areas such as New York City and other East Coast areas fairly
In fact, sometimes it has seems that the more Wal-Mart has attempted
to create a more diverse image for itself, by stressing the presence of
women in its upper managerial ranks, to hiring retirees and mentally
challenged individuals as greeters to the store, the more hypocritical its
labor practices have seemed. The cumulated result of this bad press and
the company's poor workplace management policies was the recent sex-
discrimination suit waged against the company by female staff members.
(Featherstone, 2003) Also, Barbara Ehrenreich's 2001 book Nickel and
Dimed, which portrays the author's masquerade in a variety of low-paying,
low-skill jobs and is subtitled on not getting by in America,' portrays
Selling in Minnesota' at the retailing giant as the inferno of her descent
Although the author does not explicitly say it, even working as a
waitress in a diner or scrubbing as a maid was more amenable, given the
fact that were less hypocrisy about notions of advancement at Jerry's' and
The Harvest Diner' and the fact that the low pay of the maids was
justified because it offered clients mother's hours.'
However, Wal-Mart does not merely wish to tread
...