Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price

Hey all

As always I ran extensive searches on this topic, and couldn't dig up any threads on it, which surprised me really, but please correct me if I missed a thread

Has anybody seen this film? Its a 2005 documentary by Robert Greenwald on the steamrolling giant that is Wal-Mart. I watched it last night, and found it both interesting and entertaining.

The film chronicles the the stories of people whose lives have been affected by the profit-driving behaviour of Wal-Mart. The local businesses who have gone bust because they can't compete with their prices, the ex-employees whose lives have been ruined through discrimination and bullying, and the customers whose rapes, assaults, robberies, and murders in Wal-Mart's parking lots go unprevented because Wal-Mart don't pay for security guards to watch their hundreds of parking lot cameras.


Here is a trailer:





Source: Movie Website

This documentary is very tongue-in-cheek, and like many of its kind you have to take it with a pinch of salt - the overall objective is to make Wal-Mart look as bad as possible. It was interesting, however, to see that many communities had managed to overturn Wal-Mart's planning permissions in their towns, and drive them out!

So, has anybody seen this film, and if so, what were your thoughts?

Originally posted by DragonsDomain
It was interesting, however, to see that many communities had managed to overturn Wal-Mart's planning permissions in their towns, and drive them out!

I wish my city could have done this. Had a Wal-mart centrally located in the city, but they wanted a super wal-mart and the space wasn't big enough. So they built a brand new spanking wal-mart way on the other side of the city. Soon after the smaller business surronding it died out, the bigger companies(Bockbuster) moved to a diffrent location. Now we have a pretty much an empty strip mall in the middle of the city. Now Wal-mart went well out of their way to build another super wal-mart on the other side of the city.(We aren't even that big...) There was a lot of people oppsing it because it was close to a school... so they said they'd move the access road to the school, etc. Now we are going to have two super wal-marts!? On oppisite sides of the city? Major highway closed due to it,(plus they are putting in more round abouts off of and on the highway... ick...)