The high cost of low price: Wal-Mart’s website discrimination barely scratches the surface.

While I sympathize with Robert Accettura that discrimination of this sort against web browsers is objectionable (particularly when important services like disaster relief service forms only allow Microsoft Internet Explorer users), there are Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price movie postermany stronger reasons to object to Wal-Mart; we barely need to get into how their website won’t let Firefox users view movies.

  • Wal-Mart exploits their employees around the world with pay so low Wal-Mart almost gets the labor for free,
  • mom-and-pop shops can’t compete with Wal-Mart because of Wal-Mart’s unfair competition (partially due to worker exploitation, partially due to getting tax abatements and gifts from towns seeking a Wal-Mart store),
  • the biggest class action lawsuits in the US are suits against Wal-Mart. The current lawsuit alleges systematic discrimination against women employees, previous suits included workers getting locked in and not being paid for their full working hours,
  • Wal-Mart parking lots are notoriously unsafe places to be and Wal-Mart could make this significantly better at virtually no cost,
  • Wal-Mart employees give many orders of magnitude more money to charity than the Walton family yet employees make so much less than the Walton family (which is worth billions),
  • learn about how Wal-Mart ignores threats to ecology until they’re shamed into reacting.

None of these things are hard to find online, but Robert Greenwald’s documentary “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” documents it all quite well. A lot of people have neighbors who work at Wal-Mart and you can learn a lot about the Wal-Mart corporation by talking to them.