When the company's founder Sam Walton, died in 1992, he left behind a staggering 80 billion dollars. His widow and children are now worth more than Bill Gates and Warren Buffet combined. Unfortunately most of this wealth has been accumulated through the use of deceit and manipulation. Public relations experts are kept very busy trying to keep up the appearance of a wholesome family shopping center.

Unfair Employer

Women working at Wal-Mart definitely feel they have been pushed around long enough. They have filed the largest work place biased lawsuit in U.S. history due to the sexist nature of Wal-Mart's policies. On average, female employees working there earn thirty-seven cents less on the hour than their male counterparts. And they make up ninety-two percent of the cashiers but only fourteen percent of store managers.

In 2001 they were forced to pay six million dollars for violations of The Americans with Disabilities Act, passing over handicapped applicants for more able-bodied workers. Discrimination towards African-American truck drivers has also recently surfaced as an issue of concern.

The employees there seem to have a high threshold for pain. They'd better, because Wal-Mart has some of the worst healthcare imaginable. For a family, the deductible is 3,000 dollars. And they must wait far too long for coverage. A full time employee has to work there for six months to get their policy. On top of every thing else the workers are forced to work different hours from month to month or risk disciplinary action. Disgruntled employees are easily replaced with fresh, friendly faces.

Tainted Food

From one of their filthy, overseas, illegally operating food plants straight to your dinner table…even the family dog gets a special treat in his kibble: Melamine. Melamine is an arsenic derivative used in pesticides and fertilizers. E. coli has been found in various foods including spinach and peanut butter. Salmonella has also been an issue in the Chinese factories that supply Wal-Mart's shelves. Wal-Mart has also refused to give the almost expired and excess food to shelters for the needy. They just throw it out despite the desperate need. This lack of any kind of heart is a large part of what has caused nationwide shortages in food banks. Top brass in Wal-Mart's executive branch have flagrantly flaunted their wealth and left the bottom rung of the American populous to starve to death in a free country.

Wal-Marsh

Wal-Mart loves sensitive wetland ecosystems. It appears they make a great spot to set up shop. One acre at a time they are covering up tracts of the last of the natural beauty the world has to offer with pavement and lies. And then, when they decide that across the street they would sell more paper towels, they abandon the old building, leaving it to rot. Graffiti and vandalism are inevitable. And since the next logical occupant must be a large retail style store the site never gets sold because no one can compete with Wally-World across the road.

In 2004, a swarm of lawsuits in nine states for violations of environmental laws stung Wal-Mart in the backside. They ended up paying 400,000 dollars out of court. They even have designs on your culture. They had no problem putting up a Super Center in the shadow of a two-thousand year old pyramid from the Teotihuacán Empire located in Mexico. The natives were understandably upset. You can see a Wal-Mart lurking in almost any culture in the world, ready to pounce on the people's pocketbooks. What's next, replacing the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem with the “wailing” Wal-Mart?

Pack Your Bags Mom and Pop

The days of small people with big dreams are almost over. No one can compete with those gosh darned low prices. No longer will Americans be able to achieve their goals of simple business. Even when communities rally to stop Wal-Mart from moving in, corporate terrorism and back room politics, get them in the door. As a result, people must shop there, despite their best interests. And since nobody has a choice of where to shop anymore they can't complain when some of the products they are sold turn out to be junk.

The products are so shoddy because the manufacturers are forced to compete for Wal-Mart's business which in many cases ends up with American jobs being sent overseas. Paul Krugman, a Princeton University economist was quoted as saying "Wal-Mart is so big and so centralized that it can all at once hook Chinese and other suppliers into its digital system. So-wham!-you have a large switch to overseas sourcing in a period quicker than under the old rules of retailing."

Underage workers in some of the retail giant's supplier's sweatshops have long been at the end of Wal-Mart's thoughts .The notion that utilizing another countries poverty-stricken people and those people's children for cheap labor because said countries laws don't stand against it is horrendous. Just because someone will work for a single crumb of food when they are obviously starving does not mean its okay if that's all you give them.

The Wrap Up

The bottom line is globally, Wal-Mart has dominated the retail industry. They should have been using this power constructively and with regard to the needs of others less fortunate. Instead they have mindlessly gobbled up any and all profits they can. The flaws of Wal-Mart's business strategies have been underplayed for far too long. When they go on for so long without being acknowledged, a company's bad habits seem to turn into evil ethics. This is what seems to have happened in this case. The size and strength of Sam Walton's brainchild should mandate its role as a positive influence for commerce worldwide. But instead the focus has remained solely on money. But it may not be too late for this low price leviathan to reshape its image and move forward in a positive direction. One feather in their cap is the assistance they provided in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Mobilizing a convoy of trucks loaded with relief supplies, they helped many people who had lost it all. In another move towards a softer more huggable store, Wal-Mart lowered all generic prescription prices to just four dollars. There is no doubt that this will save millions for the infirmed and elderly. This is just the kind of thing that may eventually rejuvenate their bad reputation if they don't just drop the act when the heat dies down..

In Lee Scotts 23 Jan 2008 speech entitled "The Company of the future”, He laid out a set of goals they will be striving for this year. He plans on switching over to 100% renewable energy sources in order to power their many stores. They will also be changing their product lines to include more environmentally friendly products. Employees' benefits and ethical treatment are also on the docket for this year. More rigorous inspections of food, more affordable healthcare, and a renewed commitment to reflect the diverse needs of the communities which Wal-Mart serves are all things, necessary to gain back the consumer's trust. If they can follow through with their lofty promises the public at large may rethink the image of the world's second largest company. But until proven otherwise they represent the ugliness of corporate greed hiding behind a familiar smiley face.

1. We have to admit that people will continue uploading copyrighted content and there's no way to stop them. It's just impossible to sort through all of the videos and even if the guys at youtube somehow did it, there are plenty of other sites that will host them.
2. Now we have to admit that youtube profiting from other peoples' videos is wrong. Viacom, Fox, or any other company (even a homemade project) deserves to be paid for their work. It's stealing money from the people who made the videos. Let's face it, you're not going to pay for an arctic monkeys music video from itunes when you can see it for free on youtube (I'm just as guilty as you are).
3. Maybe people don't want exposure. You know, it may sound crazy, but it's still their right. Suppose someone wanted a small business and not some crazy internet phenomenon. Whether it can bring them more profit or not, it's not our choice to decide.

Now that that's out of the way, my proposed solution:

Force Youtube to pay companies like Viacom based on how many hits their content gets. I realize this raises more questions like "How much should youtube pay per hit? Should companies like Viacom then be able to tell youtube how to advertise on its videos pages? And how does this solve the problem of people who just don't want more exposure?"

Well, i thought about this for a while. Then i saw the "channels" page on Youtube which got me thinking "what if they had (for example) an NBC channel? Then NBC could control the ads on their own channel." Other videos would remain the same but company channels would have different control of ads. The regular text ads could stay up and still benefit youtube, but during the video there would be NBC ads benefiting NBC. A win-win i think.

I still haven't thought of anything to help people who don't want exposure. I guess you could still report your videos to youtube that you don't want up there, but that's about all i can think of. Hopefully that won't be much of a problem.

Note: While i was writing this article, I hadn't heard of the Youtube Partner Program. After looking into it, it sounds like a great idea. What they really need to do is expand on that idea and incorporate big time companies like Viacom (with their own channels like i talked about earlier). I think that would be the best solution and I'm glad Youtube at least took a step towards ending the conflict. We may see a world where all the world's videos are on one site and no one is angry about it. Someday.