Wal-Mart: High price, low price

We watched the documentary "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" last night. It's 90 minutes of blathering that blames the world's most successful retail store for poverty, environmental concerns, crime, unemployment, crippling the First Amendment, buying off politicians, cheating the tax system, undermining international workers rights, destroying our education system, racism, sexism, imperialism, and every other ism you can think of. And that's no exaggeration. In fact, Wal-Mart was blamed for more in this movie than George Bush has been blamed for by the New York Times!

It's no surprise that the film was funded, in part, by unions. You see, Wal-Mart does everything in its power to squash unions in its U.S.-based stores. And the unions don't like that one bit, because they're losing out on the membership dues of hundreds of thousands of potential blood sources for them to leech off of.

The people in the movie blamed Wal-Mart for all of their woes. They didn't, of course, ever blame themselves. They complained that Wal-Mart made them work overtime and didn't pay them for it. If a company had done that to me, I'd have left and sued them. They complained that Wal-Mart didn't pay them enough, instead of asking themselves why they didn't go to college so they could get a better job. It was sad to me to see these people pointing fingers at everyone but themselves for their woes.

There's also a book out called, "How Wal-Mart is Destroying America (and the World)." Wah wah wah. Destroying America? Destroying the world? You so crazy!

Why is Wal-Mart thriving? It's about the prices, stupid. Because they're able to bring goods to the average American at a far less cost than anyone else. That's why my parents shop there. They can get fertilizer and a coffee maker for much less than the "mom and pop" stores that Wal-Mart is so allegedly so evilly putting out of business. To me, Wal-Mart does America a service in bringing these products to my family; and, yes, they make a buck along the way.

Are they the perfect company? No. It would be great if they paid a little more, gave better benefits, gave more to charity. They're just better at doing what just about every other company is trying to do: make a buck.

The last 15 minutes of the movie were actually good. I have nothing against Wal-Mart. But, the last segment was about people in Inglewood, Calif., and a small town in Arizona, and how those people successfully fought Wal-Mart from building a store in their town. To me, that last segment was about individual entrepeneurship; the stuff that America is built on. Though I have nothing against Wal-Mart, it was good to see these people put their minds to something and do it.

If only more of these people whining about Wal-Mart would actually go do something about their personal situations, maybe Wal-Mart would have to look at how it does business.