Wal-Mart

http://walmartstores.com/AboutUs/8123.aspx

Wal-Mart as a company has dominated America as the model for retailing for the past few decades.  Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, built the company on a foundation of high volume, low prices and fast turnover.  The portion of the corporate website that deals with the philosophy of Wal-Mart speaks of how they save their customers money by offering the best deals. This way, they reason, their customers have extra money to invest elsewhere.  What Wal-Mart fails to explain on this page of their site is that to offer these remarkable prices, they have to purchase their manufactured goods from foreign countries, primarily China.  According to a program aired by PBS, Wal-Mart relies heavily on imports instead of domestically produced goods.  Many companies within the United States cannot afford to sell their products to Wal-Mart for the prices they ask and still pay their workers reasonable salaries.  Wal-Mart simply drops the manufacturer if they can’t adjust to their standards, which sends the message that the company needs to have a factory abroad for Wal-Mart to purchase from them.  It is also sadly ironic that while Americans can afford Chinese products through Wal-Mart, there are very few industrial workers in China who can afford American made merchandise.