The Wal*Mart Movie is hyperbole, hype, and rhetoric. Why? H&H Hardware in Middlefield, Ohio. did not close because Wal-Mark was coming to town. Via Huffington Post
“The movie tells the story of H&H Hardware in Middlefield, Ohio. It’s a good business, run by good people, but a Wal-Mart is coming to town, and H&H is forced out of business. The segment is elegiac, with sad and frustrated comments from Don Hunter, the man who founded H&H in 1962, and Hunter’s son Jon, to whom he turned over the business in 1996.”
“But it turns out the story did not happen as Greenwald presents it. H&H closed three months before the Wal-Mart opened its doors, and Don Hunter told me that the decision to shut down H&H had nothing to do with Wal-Mart. “Really, there was no connection,” he told me. “I’ve seen a lot of small local entities wiped out because of Wal-Mart, it happens all over, but that was not the case here.” In addition, businesspeople in Middlefield told me that H&H had been a troubled enterprise for several years, hit by the economic downturn of a few years ago and plagued by poor management decisions. Jon Hunter’s decision to close surprised no one.”
- A full 76 percent of Wal-Mart store management started as hourly associates.
- The average pay for hourly associates is $10.11 an hour
- All Wal-Mart hourly associates are eligible for benefits
- Wal-Mart provides affordable health insurance to more than one million people, offering a choice of 18 different plans for as little as $23 a month
- In 2006, Wal-Mart will spend roughly $4.7 billion on benefits for their associates.
- Last year, Wal-Mart created more than 125,000 job opportunities for workers across America.
- In some parts of America, more than 30 percent of Wal-Mart associates had been unemployed the previous year.
- Thousands of applicants apply for the 300-400 new jobs created by each new store.
- Recently, a record 25,000 Chicagoans applied for just 325 jobs at the Wal-Mart store in Evergreen Park, Ill
- More than 11,000 job-seekers applied for 400 openings at a new Wal-Mart store in Oakland, Calif.
- Wal-Mart will build, over the next few years, more than 50 stores in neighborhoods with high crime or unemployment rates, bringing between 15,000 and 25,000 jobs and generating more than $100 million in tax revenue for these areas.
- Wal-Mart creates hundreds of thousands of jobs for American suppliers. Small businesses across the country compete to sell their products at Wal-Mart.
- Families that shop at Wal-Mart can save more than $2,329 a year, including upwards of 20 percent on groceries, because of the existence of a Wal-Mart in their community, according to recent independent studies.
- Wal-Mart is the largest corporate cash contributor to charities in the United States, contributing over $200 million just last year to more than 100,000 charities, most of which occur at the local level.
