Monday, December 5, 2011

Reader Response # 5: “The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know"

Through the use of examples and statistics, Charles Fishman has made many strong points about the negative impact of Wal-Mart on America economy; Wal-Mart could help increase sale production, but the cheap prices brought devastating profit to its suppliers, resulting in more employment cutoffs. By beginning his essay with the discussion of Vlasic’s gallon-sized pickle jar, Fishman not only efficiently attracts readers’ attentions, but it also allows him to transit from a small problem to a global one. Beside Vlasic, other suppliers of Wal-Mart are also financially at lost; With the low price, these companies would be making little or no profits and would eventually closed out, and if they are not closing out, they would use cheap, foreign labors like those in China to cut off labor expenses. In either case, Fishman highlights that they all would results in thousands of employments in America. Moreover, Fishman reveals in paragraph 31 that he is struggling with finding corroborated sources to support his points, but it does not weakened his claim about Wal-Mart. Instead, it strengthens it. By revealing that Wal-Mart and its suppliers do not want to be interviewed or shared information, Fisherman demonstrates that Wal-Mart wanted to hide their bad business conducts from its consumers.

Although I sometimes shop at Wal-Mart because it is closed to my home, I decide to stop shopping at Wal-Mart after reading Fishman’s article. I agree with him that as consumers of Wal-Mart, we are helping it to hurt the economy. With more consumers, Wal-Mart would gain more power and eventually becomes the biggest monopoly in the America’s capitalist economy. With Wal-Mart being the biggest monopoly, there would be no competitions between companies and without competitions in the business market, there would not be any qualified products. Yet, if there are qualified products, it would come with a price and that price is unemployment and cheap labor, a form of human oppression.