Human cost behind bargain shopping
Wal-mart's slogan is : Always Low Prices. After read this article, I know the source may be biased, but I can still get a sense of how the "low Prices' come. A woman in Bangladesh works 70 hours a week with 17 cents an hour to sew pants for Wal-Mart. The pants she sew is sold $4.87 each piece in the United States. She said if ' there is 8 cents more per hours for her, she could have a decent life in Bangladesh'.
So you may think, it is the factory's problem without raising the wage. But according to the article, they asked ' Wal-mart to give them one cent more for each piece and they will help those poor people, but Wal-mart says no and saying give me 2 cents less', the other business man says' we have to meet the deadline, otherwise they (U.S.) could take the business elsewhere.'
$4.87, a pair of pants, is really really cheap. That is how Wal-mart get this cheap product to sell.
so who can tell me how much Wal mart earn by selling one pair of pants? material, labor, shipping, tax. Other money are all Wal-mart's. Huge profit.
1 comment:
As a frequent shopper at Walmart, I appreciate the "always low prices" motto that serves as Walmart's mission statement. I do not want to pay anymore than I have to when I go shopping. The fact that Walmart may purchase its merchandise from manufacturers overseas that use low cost labor is fine with me. Consider the alternative: if I must pay higher prices at Walmart because they use higher priced suppliers, then that means I have less money to spend elsewhere. Should we feel sorry for those who will never see my money spent on them? As far as the workers in the third-world countries that supply Walmart, what sort of job would they have if Walmart wasn't buying their merchandise? I suspect that these folks are better off than without Walmart. If you want to pay higher prices at Walmart as some form of foreign aid, I'd rather you just donate some money to people directly rather than going through Walmart. In my mind, Walmart's number one job is to generate maximum profits for its shareholders.
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