Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Strategic Corporate Research Report

[Excerpt] Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (hereinafter Wal-Mart) is the second-largest company in the world. It has more annual revenue than the GDP of Switzerland. It sells more DVDs, magazines, books, CDs, dog food, diapers, bicycles, toys, toothpaste, jewelry, and groceries than any other retailer does worldwide. It is the largest retailer in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the second-largest in the United Kingdom, and the third largest in Brazil, With its partners, it is the largest retailer in Central America. Wal-Mart is also the largest private employer in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and it has 1.8 million employees around the globe. Wal-Mart is so huge that it effectively sets the terms for large swaths of the global economy, from retail wages to apparel prices to transoceanic shipping rates to the location of toy factories. Indeed, if there is one single aspect to understand about the company, it is the fact that Wal-Mart is transforming the relations of production in virtually every product category it sells, through its relationships with suppliers. But its influence goes far beyond the economy. It sets social policy by refusing to sell certain types of birth control. Its construction of supercenters molds the landscape, shapes traffic patterns, and alters the local commercial mix. The retail goliath shapes culture by selling the music of patriotic country singer Garth Brooks but not the critical (and hilarious) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (the Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction. It influences politics by donating millions to conservative politicians and think tanks. Wal-Mart is, in short, one of the most powerful entities in the world. Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart has developed a long list of critics, including unions, human rights organizations, religious groups, environmental activists, community organizations, small business groups, academics, children’s rights groups, and even institutional investors. These groups have exposed the company’s illegal union-busting tactics, its many violations of overtime laws, its abuse of child labor, its egregious healthcare policies, its super-exploitation of immigrant workers, its rampant gender discrimination, the horrific labor conditions at its suppliers’ factories, and its unlawful environmental degradation. They have also chronicled the deleterious effect Wal-Mart has on the public coffers and the quality of community life. New Wal-Mart stores and distribution centers often swallow up government subsidies and tax breaks, take public land, create more congestion, reduce overall wages, destroy retail variety, and increase public outlays for healthcare. To its critics, Wal-Mart represents the worst aspects of 21st-eentury capitalism. Wal-Mart usually counters any criticism with two words: low prices. It is a powerful mantra in a consumerist world. The company does make more products affordable to more people, and that is nothing to sneeze at when wages are stagnant, jobs insecure, pensions disappearing, and health coverage shrinking. With low prices, Wal-Mart helps working men and women get more from their meager paychecks, more necessities like bread, and more luxuries, like roses, too. It is a brilliant and incontrovertible argument, and Wal-Mart’s most ardent defenders take it even farther. They say its obsession with low prices makes the entire economy more efficient and more productive. Suppliers and competitors have to produce more and better products with the same resources, and that redounds to everyone. In the micro, it means falling prices and rising product quality. In the macro, it means economic growth, more jobs, and higher tax revenues. To its defenders, Wal-Mart represents the best aspects of 21st-century capitalism. Despite their radical opposition, critics and defenders of the world’s largest corporation agree on one thing: Wal-Mart represents 21st-century capitalism. It symbolizes a system of increasing market penetration and decreasing social regulation, where more and more aspects of life around the world are subject to economic competition. Wal-Mart’s success rests upon the ongoing destruction of social power in favor of corporate power. It takes advantage of the conditions of the neo-liberal world, from the availability of instant and inexpensive global communication to the continuing collapse of agricultural employment around the world to the rapid diffusion of technological innovation to the oversupply of subjugated migrant labor in nearly every country to the continued existence of undemocratic and corporate-dominated governments. For some, this is as it should be, all part of capitalism’s natural and ultimately benign development. For the rest of us, Wal-Mart is at the heart of what is wrong with the world

Montana Business Quarterly, Fall 2006

This is an academic publication produced by the Bureau of Business and Economic Research (BBER) at the University of Montana’s College of Business. This is volume 44, number 3.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/mtbusinessquarterly/1187/thumbnail.jp

Foundations of Business [OER]

The Open Educational Resource (OER), Foundations of Business, was created for use in Virginia Commonwealth University BUSN 201. In this course, students will study the concepts, principles and operations of private enterprise. They will compare and contrast sole proprietorships, partnerships, and corporations – and the advantages and disadvantages of each. Students will explore the functions of modern business management, marketing, and ethics and social responsibility that can improve or tarnish a brand. They will also look at the human resource management side of running a business, and learn how employers can motivate their employees. Finally, students will address the numbers side of running a business and examine bookkeeping, accounting, financial management, and financial statements

Identity preservation & traceability: the state of the art - from a grain perspective (status of agricultural quality systems / traceability / certification systems)

A descriptive paper on the state of identity preservation and traceability (IPT) as it relates domestically and internationally to food safety and economics. While not exhaustive, it is illustrative of trends. Identity preservation and traceability (IPT) are not new concepts; however, the growth of public and business interest and concerns regarding them has grown tremendously during the past decade due to many events, which has resulted in these concepts joining together within a single concept (with the same title). This paper, while attempting to be thorough, will highlight the major systems of IPT from a US business perspective. Before and during the research of this study many companies and organizations have been created, bought out, or simply gone out of business. Government and non-government organizations have changed regulations and how they have adapted to current world events. Thus the state of IPT will be a sampling of the major players that are in existence during the research. Several of the examples of IPT programs will be of situations that affect the US grain industry, however, other examples will be provided.;Scope of this work; to provide an introduction to, and summary of, identity preservation and traceability (IPT) systems and programs presently available, develop a conceptual model of IPT at the farmer level, and interpretation of the overall art.;The purpose of this research is to provide a sampling of government, industry, and company approaches towards identity preservation and traceability (IPT) systems from the 1990s to early 2007. From this the audience should gain a better understanding of the complexity of IPT systems, rules that it functions under, how IPT is shaped and modified; primary, support, and ancillary components, and the diverse reasons why IPT is critical for food safety and the market.;The format of this work starts with IPT history followed by the theory, design, and general components of IPT, examples of IPT programs and standards, examples of auditing and laboratory firms, chapters that discuss domestic/foreign policy and advisory groups, software providers, process facilitators, food recalls/insurance, cost-benefit spreadsheet that focuses on farm level IP for comparison, farmer IP questionnaire, interpretation, conclusion, and appendixes, related products guide, glossary, directory of resources, and works cited

American Square Dance Vol. 62, No. 12 (Dec. 2007)

Monthly square dance magazine that began publication in 1945

Professor/practitioner case development program - 1996 case studies

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/1342/thumbnail.jp

Working capital management of trading houses in India

Capital formation is of crucial importance in the process of economic development. Experience of development in other countries suggests that a high rate of capital formation was achieved to trigger rapid economic growth. The Indian planning commission puts this idea correctly when it states: "The level of production and the material well-being a community can attain depends, in the main, on the stock of capital and its disposal, i.e., on the amount of land per capital and of productive equipment in the shape of machinery, buildings, tools and implements factories, locomotives, engines, irrigation facilities, power installations and communications. The large stock of capital, the greater trend to be the productivity of labour and therefore, the volume of commodities and services that can be turned out with same effort." The investment in the working capital is decisive to any financial manager as it is important as the investment in the fixed capital. The management of current assets is similar to that of fixed assets in a sense that in both cases the firm analyses their effects on its return and risk. Working capital management focuses on firm's investment in current assets and current liabilities. Excessive investment in current assets impairs firm's profitability, as idle investment earns nothing while inadequate amount of working capital can threaten the solvency of the firm, if it fails to meet its current obligations

Research on approaches to public funding and development of tertiary education within selected OECD nations

No abstract available