lol...Most (70%) of Wal-Mart's Products Are Produced in China

[psyon]

http://www.organicconsumers.org/corp...hina113004.cfm

WAL-MART'S INVENTORY OF STOCK PRODUCED IN
CHINA TO REACH $18 BILLION

JIANG JINGLING, CHINA BUSINESS WEEKLY
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/bw/bwtop.html

The world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc, says its inventory of stock produced in China is expected to hit US$18 billion this year, keeping the annual growth rate of
over 20% consistent over two years.

The trend is expected to continue, company officials revealed.

"We expect our procurement stock from China to continue to grow at a similar
rate in line with Wal-Mart's growth worldwide, if not faster," said Lee
Scott, the president and CEO (chief executive officer) of Wal-Mart.

An unnamed company official also stated the firm will extend its procurement
base from South China's Pearl River Delta to the North and East China in the
coming few years.

A market rumour says the retailer has its eyes on a 340,000-square metre
warehouse at a logistics garden of the Shanghai Waigaoqiao Bonded Area.

Scott covertly visited the site earlier this month, and hopes to own the
whole warehouse to accommodate the firm's further expansion in China.

At present, Wal-Mart has quite limited warehouse resources in East China.

Xu Jun, Wal-Mart China's director of external affairs, ruled out the rumour,
saying the CEO has never visited that or any other site for a warehouse.

Nevertheless, he said China is Wal-Mart's most important supplier in the
world. The overseas procurement home office in Shenzhen, a city of South
China's Guangdong Province, has played a key role in the firm's global
purchasing business.

Wal-Mart shifted its overseas procurement centre from Hong Kong to Shenzhen
in February 2002 to better serve the purchasing and exporting business.

"If Wal-Mart were an individual economy, it would rank as China's
eighth-biggest trading partner, ahead of Russia, Australia and Canada," Xu
said.

By the end of September, 2004, the top seven trading partners to the Chinese
mainland are the European Union, the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, ASEAN
(Association of Southeast Asian Nations), South Korea and China's Taiwan
Province, state statistics from the Ministry of Commerce.

Last year, the firm bought US$15 billion products from China, half from
direct purchasing, the other from the firm's suppliers in China.

More than 5,000 Chinese enterprises have established steady supply alliances
with Wal-Mart.

Good quality and low price are the major attractions of the retailing giant.

Insiders point out Wal-Mart's imports from China have largely influenced the
U.S. trade deficit in China, which is expected to reach US$150 billion this
year.

Xu declined to comment if the anti-dumpling measures of the US Department of
Commerce have impacted the firm's procurement of textile commodities and
household appliances in China, saying again that China is an important
sourcing base for the firm.

So far, more than 70% of the commodities sold in Wal-Mart are made in China.

Experts say Wal-Mart's plan of increasing its procurement from China has
granted the firm a positive corporate reputation in the country.

"Buying more products in China means more job opportunities, which helps the
firm win not only the government's hearts, but also the customers'
appreciations," said Wang Yao, director of information department under the
China General Chamber of Commerce.

In the United States, poor people find it possible to afford cheap "Made In
China" products for their daily necessities, Wang said.

Wal-Mart, headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, entered China in 1996. It
has opened 39 stores, including supercenters, "Sam's Clubs" and neighborhood
markets in 15 cities around China, including Beijing, Harbin and Dalian.

It has recently announced the opening of its first store in Shanghai, slated
for the middle of next year.

The firm has a total of 4,900 stores in 10 countries worldwide. [ November
29, 2004 ]

[Kill -9]

This is no news to me. Wanna save american jobs, shop at Target

[kit'n]

i hate walmart.


i read on the paper yesterday that it came out as the top grocery store in dfw this past year, so many grocery store chains are taking drastic measures to fight back. alberton's cut all its employees to part time so that they wouldnt have to pay benefits. who fucked is that?

goddamn. it causes small mom and pop shops to go out, it causes major toy stores to be in serious jeapordy, and now grocery stores.

[dfwtrader]

i do not know how accurate the number is...but a lot of the wal mart culture died when sam walton died. it still presents a pro american image which it probably is, but it does not back it up with its old "made in the usa" that sam instilled.....

i mean i went there on veterans day and bot some little american flags and stamped "made in china".....something so wrong about that.

j

[dfwtrader]

are you trying to tell me that wal mart ran out small mom and pop grocers?? come on do you really thing albertsons, tom thumb, and krogers are mom and pop. they were in the grocery business well before wal mart, and either put the likes of skaggs, piggly wiggly out of biz or acquired them.

from a grocery point.....i dont think you can jump on wal mart for that one.

j

Originally Posted by kit'n

i hate walmart.


i read on the paper yesterday that it came out as the top grocery store in dfw this past year, so many grocery store chains are taking drastic measures to fight back. alberton's cut all its employees to part time so that they wouldnt have to pay benefits. who fucked is that?

goddamn. it causes small mom and pop shops to go out, it causes major toy stores to be in serious jeapordy, and now grocery stores.

[dfwtrader]

assume all that is true, i dont have any contradictory info...isn't the comsumer fucking america right up the ass.....i mean im sure you dont shop there...i rarely do. but assuming they are operating within the confines of the law all people have to do is stop shopping there....or buy stock in the company and bring a referendum to the shareholders meeting to not censor material.....and it does not take a big hitter to bring a referndum....all you need to do is own one share. get it on the proxy ballot, get it on the agenda early in the fiscal year and present it at the meeting.

a very small shareholder of verizon is doing that very thing. he is bring a ref to the table at the meeting to vote on not allowing verizon to donate any more money to jesse jacksons rainbow push.

just a thought,
justin

Originally Posted by E-brake

Wal-mart is fucking america right up the ass. They are killing domestic jobs at an alarming rate, they just put RubberMaid out of business, and locally they have put API the larges plastic molder in Texas out of business along will all of their tooling and shipping businesses. Almost 30,000 jobs were lost in DFW just as a result of the API closing and this is on a local scale, nationally Wal-Mart kills 5 american jobs for every employee that they hire. As the largest employer in the Nation this is very alarming, this one retail chain could drive our entire nation into a depression faster than even Bush can.

some more little tid bits:
n spite of its large volume of sales, Wal-Mart's corporate contributions are small. Wal-Mart ranked last among major discount retailers, donating four-tenths of a percent of its earnings, well behind its competitors (U.S. corporations average just over one percent). A cornerstone of the company philosophy is that it "gives something back" by keeping prices low.

Despite a well-publicized "Made in the U.S.A." campaign, 85 percent of the stores' items are made overseas, often in Third World sweatshops. Read more about sweatshops, Wal-Mart and other U.S. retailers.

Wal-Mart demands that hundreds of recording artists, primarily alternative rock, hip-hop and rap musicians "clean up" their lyrics as a condition of distribution, imposing what amounts to cultural censorship, and bans all music carrying a warning label. It also pulls magazines off the shelves that are considered too provocative.

source: http://www.pbs.org/itvs/storewars/stores.html

[Vosh]

Hate to say this but I shop there, and often for all my groceries, along with Sams. It's cheap... it saves me money, and time to shop there. What would you recommend I do?

Oh, and don't Gap, Nike, Reebok, etc, etc etc all have sweatshops, all have products made in countries. Are you arguing that Wal-mart does it too much, or that it shouldn't be done at all?

[dfwtrader]

well i cannot address the board of directors issue, but i was able to get a ref in front of the EDS board 2 years ago concering the burn rate of their current liquid assets....and yes it was 4 of us totalling about 35000 shares of stock, and we had to pay about 1700 bucks in attorneys fees and proxy fees, and guess what i lost big time, but i did something

.....so im not going to dispute that it would take some work, but if its something that is important enough, then i think people should get up and do something.....as i stated if consumers didnt shop there then wal mart would not be in biz.....so please dont tell me about the real world i guarantee i have been in at least as long as you have.

and actually it would take about 112 billion to buy half of walmart stock at todays current $53 price.

j

Originally Posted by E-brake

In the real world it doesnt work like that, I own a few thousand dollars worth of Apple stock and I cant issue a referendum. At least not without spending $20,000 - $30,000 on attorney fees to have all the paperwork done correctly. Even then it would be pointless because the board of directors can simply ignore the referendum or vote it out in about three seconds. Every employee that Wal-Mart has owns stock, betweeen all of their millions of shares they cant even get a referendum put together to start a union to protect themselves. Fact is unless you can put enough stock together between yourself and your friends to equal over 50% of the total for the entire company (this would only cost you 16 billion dollars or so to pull off) you cant do shit.

[dfwtrader]

i know i know....i actually agree with you on a lot...the economies of scale do not favor the small guy.....and with real wages decreasing for the majority of people its not getting any better. i was not trying to be completely rude...lol i find a lot of the stuff you comment on very insightful.....not directing towards you individually, because i dont know what you are active in...i just wish more people would be willing to make a little sacrifice and do someithing.....about anything, just pick something you care about and act on it......

Originally Posted by E-brake

Its a slipery slope, we demand cheaper products, cheaper products cost us jobs making us earn less money. When we earn less money we demand even cheaper products, costing us more jobs etc.

If the government doesnt start putting terrifs on imports from China American workers are going to have to work for $0.50 a day just to have a job. Within our lifetimes it is very possible that the middle class will disapear, all that will be left is the extremely wealthy and the extremely poor. We will all get to live like Mexicans hoping to get a little handout just to feed our families.

[dfwtrader]

yep your very right.....i do admit i am fortunate enought to be in business for myself and eat what i kill....i would rather my fate be determined by what i can accomplish rather than some willy nilly middle manager thats having to meet the demands of the accounting department.

j

Originally Posted by E-brake

p.s. pray that you dont have a job that one of the recently laid off employees of this company can do. When API plastic in Dallas went out of business their employee union went to molding shops around DFW and underbid the workers in their factories. Nokea has a molding plant in Ft worth to make plastic covers for cell phones. A group of former API employees aproached Nokea and bid $10 an hour with no full time benifeits for labor on work that Nokea employees were getting $15 an hour for with benifeits. Every worker in their factory had to make an immediate choice, take a $5 per hour pay cut and give up benifeits for themselves and their families, or be out of work and get nothing. Those that left were easily replaced with API employees.

This is happening locally, right now its the blue collor workers but its just a matter of time before we are going to have secretaries, IT guys, programmers, engineers, executives, and high level well educated people flooding our local market looking to steal your job. Just pray that your employer likes you more than he likes saving money or you may be fucked next.

[bushsucks]

Hidden Cost Of Wal-Mart Jobs

Use of Safety Net Programs by Wal-Mart Workers in California

Arindrajit Dube
UC Berkeley Institute for Industrial Relations


Ken Jacobs
UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education


A Study for the UC Berkeley Labor CenterAugust 2, 2004

Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the United States, with over one million workers. It is the largest food retailer and the third largest pharmacy in the nation. The company employs approximately 44,000 workers in California, and has plans to expand significantly in the state over the next four years. Wal-Mart workers receive lower wages than other retail workers and are less likely to have health benefits. Other major retailers have begun to scale back wages and benefits in the state, citing their concerns about competition from Wal-Mart.

We estimate that Wal-Mart workers in California earn on average 31 percent less than workers employed in large retail as a whole, receiving an average wage of $9.70 per hour compared to the $14.01 average hourly earnings for employees in large retail (firms with 1,000 or more employees). In addition, 23 percent fewer Wal-Mart workers are covered by employer-sponsored health insurance than large retail workers as a whole. The differences are even greater when Wal-Mart workers are compared to unionized grocery workers. In the San Francisco Bay Area, non-managerial Wal-Mart employees earn on average $9.40 an hour, compared to $15.31 for unionized grocery workers—39 percent less—and are half as likely to have health benefits.

At these low-wages, many Wal-Mart workers rely on public safety net programs— such as food stamps, Medicare, and subsidized housing—to make ends meet. The presence of Wal-Mart stores in California thus creates a hidden cost to the state’s taxpayers.

This study is the first to quantify the fiscal costs of Wal-Mart’s substandard wages and benefits on public safety net programs in California. It also explores the potential impact on public programs of Wal-Mart’s competitive effect on industry standards.

Main Findings:

• Reliance by Wal-Mart workers on public assistance programs in California comes at a cost to the taxpayers of an estimated $86 million annually; this is comprised of $32 million in health related expenses and $54 million in other assistance.
  
  
• The families of Wal-Mart employees in California utilize an estimated 40 percent more in taxpayer-funded health care than the average for families of all large retail employees.
  
  
• The families of Wal-Mart employees use an estimated 38 percent more in other (non-health care) public assistance programs (such as food stamps, Earned Income Tax Credit, subsidized school lunches, and subsidized housing) than the average for families of all large retail employees.
  
  
• If other large California retailers adopted Wal-Mart’s wage and benefits standards, it would cost taxpayers an additional $410 million a year in public assistance to employees.

Click here for the complete study (840 KB pdf file)



http://www.dsausa.org/lowwage/walmar...t%20study.html

[Sir Meh]

This thread is making me depressed.

[Hubb]

Wow i had no idea it was this bad...im definitly not shopping there anymore

[Jay.]

For real.

Kind of weird. People that work at walmart, can only afford to shop at walmart.

Ok, I don't want to be racist here. I'm of spanish origin myself. I've noticed that older people and imagrants who don't go to school, do not have a degree, have nothing else to do than work. Take up teen jobs at fast food joints, grocery stores, etc.. They work at lower wages and more hours.

I've already tried applying many times at my local busineses. None of them have called me back.. I've called them, and I get the same answer. We are not hireing right now.

[Adam D]

In reference to the thread about Wal-Mart and California, a similar study was done in Georgia and they found a number close to half of all kids with state-assisted health care are the children of Wal-Mart employees.

Every time a Wal-Mart store is built, on average, the local government gives them $1 million in subsidies and tax breaks.

Wal-Mart is constantly sued for harassment and discrimination against women. It's also been sued (and lost) many times for predatory practices. It has an expert team of lawyers that trash any efforts to unionize their stores. Hell, you even have to watch anti-union propaganda upon hiring.

There's always deflective talk about how the company became evil after Sam Walton died. Even within the company, a lot of the problems are excused because Sam Walton never would have done it. While it is true that the company became more evil after Walton, he was no saint. Walton began the takeover of small towns and driving small business out of the market. He was also very anti-union, and Wal-Mart employees have never been the best paid employees.

It is true that a lot of the internal pride of the company was lost after he died. There's no magic in that. His offspring took over the company and carried his policies to their natural conclusions...monopolizing small towns and poor areas with low prices of cheap imported goods, low wages, low benefits, etc. Then they carried that framework into the Super Wal-Mart, the grocery chain, and foreign markets.

Mind you, this is not the case where the rotting, moldy cheese stands alone. Other grocers and retail stores underpay their employees, willingly sell sweatshop products, and trash local business. Wal-Mart just happens to be the biggest and worst of them all.