Personal Experiences

Wal-Mart’s Growth Was Through Fraud Lies and Deceit

If you are old enough to remember the Wal-Mart of the 1980’s and the mood of the nation during that time about buying American, maybe this will tweak your anger button.  During the late 70’s and the 80’s was when American businesses were first starting to move overseas in alarming numbers, unfortunately we Americans are used to this treason (my view) now. Plus this was a time when Americans got hooked on cheaper imports. During this time the American auto industry was in big trouble partly because Americans were buying the cheaper Japanese models.  This is a time area when you would see such bumper stickers as (can you eat your Toyota). On a sidebar though, in regards to the quality of the cars the big three were putting out at that time was pretty poor in comparison to say the Toyota’s and in this case it helped force the big three to start producing a better quality product. This coincided with the decline in union membership in America which also meant that the American worker’s paycheck was starting to shrink. This meant that people were requiring better quality transportation so they could get to their lower paying jobs.

Wal-Mart at this time used America’s consumer mood to grow itself. Their TV and Radio ads as well as their traveling billboards (their semi trailers) used to tout how they only bought American goods thus trying to get patriotic Americans to do all their shopping at Wal-Mart. There was a big problem with this though, they were totally lying, they were perpetrating a total fraud on the American people.

You may fairly ask me how I know such a thing, was I in their board room? No, but I was a long haul truck driver who hauled a lot of their incoming product. I am going to give you an example of how buffaloed people were by their fraud. I picked up loads from the docks in northern New Jersey about once a month plus once in a while in California. It was a common event when we would get a load assigned to pick up but when we got there the load would be staged on the docks but we had to in some cases wait several hours while the dock workers were having to replace all the stickers on every item with tags that said made in the USA. I asked the dock workers about these things because it always made it more difficult to make your delivery appointments on time and Wal-Mart distribution centers would fine the trucking company if you were late on your delivery and most times they would reschedule your appointment for a different day. This meant that you now had to sit in a truck stop parking lot and wait for your new appointment time. When you as a driver are doing this you get no pay at all because the trucking company got no pay at all. What I was told by more that a couple of dock workers was that it was required that when a Wal-Mart load came in they all had to be re-tagged. This was so that when the American consumer came in the store and looked at the tags they thought they were buying American made products which meant that Wal-Mart was helping protect American jobs. The truth was Wal-Mart was committing a total fraud on the American worker and the American public.

I remember one time that I had picked up a load of laundry detergent at the docks in north Jersey and the load was going to a distribution center in NW Wisconsin. That night as I was driving, the chatter on the CB was some other drivers were talking about where they were headed to and or who their customers were. Somewhere in the conversation Wal-Mart’s name came up. I then mentioned what had happened with my load on the dock and how it had put me a bit behind where I was hoping to be by this time. I remember one driver who got on his radio with much indigence in his voice said to me “how dare you slander a fine company like that”. My response to him was a simple truth, if what you say about someone or something is %100 the truth, then it is not slander, it is simply the truth. That man did not say anything to me after that but a few other drivers chimed in saying the same thing about what I had said about loads for Wal-Mart.

This is why I used the title that I did on this letter to anyone who wants to read it. Wal-Mart committed a total fraud on the American people. If you think about it, this fraud helped bring more customers into their stores so that these same customers would not go to Wal-Mart’s competitors thus giving Wal-Mart an unfair advantage , unfair because they were lying. Now look at the Wal-Mart company, have you ever gone into one of their stores and looked for the made in the USA tags. Unless USA is now spelled  CHINA or INDONESIA, it’s a pretty hard tag to find. I used to like to listen to Paul Harvey on the radio every chance I could. I liked the man but he was very naive. If you remember Wal-Mart was a sponsor of his and he seemed to really believe in them. Do you remember how he used to talk how if you had a Wal-Mart store in your town how you couldn’t have a better neighbor. In reality what Wal-Mart was doing then they are still doing. When a Wal-Mart moves into your community about all if not all of your local stores are forced to close because they can’t compete with Wal-Mart buying power. This caused a problem for the people/workers of the area because once all the local stores close up the employees are laid off. In many cases about the only place they can now find work is at the Wal-Mart. But, as many of you know most Wal-Mart employees are only hired as part-time worker’s which also means when these people lost their previous job they lost income and all of their benefits like insurance. At this same time look at the wealth of the owners, the kids of Mr Walton, look at how many billions each of them are worth. Yet they won’t hire most people as full-time because they say they can’t (won’t) give their people any benefits.

You know something that I have been wondering about, would Wal-Mart be anywhere near as big today if they had not been such liars and frauds in their earlier years? One of the things that was also happening during these years I speak of is that the Federal government was breaking up monster size companies like Bell Telephone Co into several smaller companies. It is my opinion that Wal-Mart should be forced to break up into about five companies because of the help they got through fraud and lies they are now a total behemoth. The American GDP (gross domestic product) is about 11 trillion per year, Wal-Mart corporation has about 1.1 trillion dollars go through their hands now each year. Folks that is %10 of our countries GDP. I totally believe that it is dangerous for any one family to have this much control of the American people’s money supply. Especially when these people have already proven that they have no problem lying to all of us.

Now, back to the bought in the USA idea, just think if Wal-Mart and or the five or so companies I wish it would get broken into would indeed only buy from American companies where only American workers and American products produced them, think what a boom to our economy this would produce. If we the American people would only buy American products then this would put many American workers back to work. But, stringent guidelines would have to be put into place to make sure that we the people were not being defrauded like we were within the Walton family before.

As most of us knows, Wal-Mart is an international company. I do believe that such a company has stores in lets say China, I believe that Wal-Mart stores in China should first buy goods made in China. This is also what the people of China badly need. Right now most people in America know that places like China make products for the purpose of export to countries like the US. Most of us also know that almost all of these product are basically of very poor quality, so basically we are paying for lousy and or unsafe products when we buy their exports. If the American people would not buy these cheaply made products it would also help the Chinese people. The population of China is about four times that of the US and these people matter just as much as people of other countries and the working poor of China depends on exports at this time. If the export markets dried up to the companies of China they would have to finally turn inward and build products for the people of China, this would be a huge boom to their domestic companies and at the same time the quality of those products made in their country for their people would have to get much better. This would make their people have a much better quality of life both by having a better paying job and they would be able to purchase products that are out of their financial reach at this time.

I guess what I am getting at is I’m trying to show how things could truly get better for the masses here in the US as well as in places like China if we the people would force behemoth companies like Wal-Mart to be held accountable for their actions. Also force our government to hold countries and companies legally accountable when they are found to be frauds and liars.