20130813: Documentary Review--Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart: The Cost of Low Prices

1. American Live action feature length film, 2005, documentary.
2. IMDB: 6.8/10.0 from 3,606 audience ratings.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 93% on the meter, but 'no consensus yet'.  From audience input, 64% favorable.  There are many mini-reviews posted on RT.  Have a look.
4. Disclaimer: I am not neutral on this issue.


5. Case Study: Middlefield Ohio, the Hunter family's hardware store, and the impact of Wal-Mart's presence.  Despite providing superior service, knowledge of inventory, and personal connections to customers, the well-established local businesses are hurt by Wal-Mart's ability to provide lower prices.  Ohio was not the only case study.  There were a good dozen across the USA, and more in China, southern Asia, Central America.


6. One of the themes of the documentary is that a few Americans are making a huge amount of money because of Wal-Mart, but orders of magnitude more people have their lives degraded by it.  For instance, many long time successful businesses go under.  Property values almost always go down in the neighborhood of a new Wal-Mart.  That is,Wal-Mart presence devalues everything near it.  A memorable quote was that small towns destroyed by Wal-Mart tend to look like they had been 'hit by a neutron bomb.'  That is, the buildings are still there, but no one is in them.  Businesses are closed, people lose their houses.


7. A second theme is that Wal-Mart is a front for Chinese economic warfare against the United States.  One of the statistics used was 'Wal-Mart reduces total wages by three billion USD per year.'  The interviewed Wal-Mart executives brag about forcing as many employees as possible from full-time work to part time.  They also encourage the employees to give the company free overtime.  As internal policy, Wal-Mart stores are understaffed.  An open secret is that many Wal-Mart employees are on public assistance.  That is, taxpayers pay bills that Wal-Mart should pay.  Wal-Mart provided health insurance is expensive, but still has high deductibles.  This pressures workers to get on public assistance.----All of these policies support the second theme; Wal-Mart is hurting the USA by making it less and less viable.


8. A third theme is more of a question: if the US government could rein in Standard Oil, why does it not even try to control Wal-Mart?


9. The interviews were excellent.  The candor of some of the blood-sucking managers at Wal-Mart was amazing in terms of admissions.  Discrimination against women, cheating employees out of overtime already done, browbeating employees to do overtime with no expectation of remuneration, blatant union-busting, and the like.  The interviews with people whose lives were affected by Wal-Mart were very direct and informative.  The pain was clear, but many facts were always delivered in parallel.


10. Wal-Mart gets subsidized up front (before moving in) by local governments and state governments directly, not just in the resulting drag on public assistance.  Many local communities have to scale back on public services such as fired teachers, cut back police departments, reduce library offerings, and so on.


11. One of the tricks I found amazingly bad was negotiating a big subsidy package, building the Wal-Mart store, then building another Wal-Mart store outside the municipality.  The first building is left empty, and the municipality gets zero tax benefit.


12. The section on environmental violations committed by Wal-Mart in the US was impressively bad.  The monetary judgments against WM were almost as impressive.


13. The Chinese segment was scary as well.  One would think WM would treat its Chinese employees better, but they do not.  The maintain sweatshops and teach their employees to lie to inspectors.


14. Given the atmosphere of lying, law breaking, wiping out competition, and maintaining sweat shops, it's not all that unexpected that Wal-Mart parking lots have a long and bad record for being crime scenes.  Rape, murder, kidnapping, armed robbery, auto vandalism, and auto theft are the more usual crimes.  Wal-Mart spends next to nothing on parking lot security for customers.


15. One line summary: The content was great, the visuals were bad.
16. Four stars of five.

Cinematography: 2/10 Poor.  It's video quality, and not the high end of video.  Soft focus, sometimes grainy, jerky camera movement, all of which detract from the content.

Sound: 7/10 Passable for video.

Acting: 8/10 The interviews were quite good, conveying facts and lots of check-able details as well as describing loss and unfairness.

Screenplay: 7/10 The flow of the work was good.