"The Real Walmart"?!? Six Big Fibs in Walmart's New Ad Campaign [View all]

[eridani]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/19/1232091/--The-Real-Walmart-Six-Big-Fibs-in-Walmart-s-New-Ad-Campaign

5. The Claim: "Meet real Walmart shoppers!" Here we meet a businessman, a teacher, a carpenter, a mechanical engineer, a firefighter and an accountant, all of them redolent with middle class status, who proudly shop at Walmart. "Living better," the tag line says, "that's the real Walmart."

The Reality: Walmart's customers are disproportionately poor, Southern and elderly. The fact that none of these demo's made it into Walmart's ad about "Our Customers" means not only that Walmart is a fibber, but also that Walmart is a disser of its own "real" customers.

6. The Claim: "We work directly with manufacturers, eliminating costly markups."

The Reality: If by "work with," the ad means "dictate to," then this claim is accurate. But again, as Charles Fishman, the business reporter who wrote The Walmart Effect asks, what is "the high cost of these low prices?" Walmart's market power is such that many of its suppliers face a stark choice: take dictation from Walmart, or lose half or more of their business. "To survive in the face of [Walmart's] pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas."

Just ask Steve Dobbins, CEO of 75-year old Carolina Mills, a company that supplies thread and yarn to textile manufacturers -- half of whom supply Walmart. His company grew steadily until 2000. Then his customers, with Walmart's gun to their heads -- began a hemhorrage of offshoring in order to find the dirt cheap labor necessary to meet Walmart's low price demands. Carolina Mills shrank from 17 factories to 7 within three years. The way Walmart "works with" its suppliers has been disastrous for American workers.