The Land of Ozz

I am having second thoughts concerning my position on big retail stores like Target. I will continue to shop at Target and other stores like Wal-Mart who are also coming under fire these days for one reason or another. My beef with Target had to so their stance on using the word Christmas in their advertising along with their choice to not allow the Salvation Army to place bell ringers out in front of Target stores. You can read my original opinion Merry, Happy, Season’s Greetings from Target. I would rather just send them a Christmas card and request that they change their policy for next year.

I found a post on The Business of America is Business concerning a movement against Wal-Mart by WakeUpWalmart.com that got me to thinking. I don’t want my actions to cause an employee to lose their job because of the loss of business or realignment of company structure due to some big protest that I took part in.

Now I want to address this Wal-Mart issue. First of all I believe that the facts in this story are tweaked to meet the needs of the cause as with most statistics. For instance the WakeUpWalmart.com web site never tells states how many part-time employees are represented in 600,000 who have no health insurance. They also do not specify how many rejected health insurance because maybe they have veteran’s benefits that includes health care at no charge. The WakeUpWalmart.com web site shows a copyright reference at the bottom of their pages for the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. They claim to have the support of 150,517 people world-wide as of this posting. That equals to less than 10% of the population of the workforce within Walmart based on numbers quoted right on the WakeUpWalmart.com site. The number of supports probably totals less than 50% of the number of Wal-Mart shoppers in my local area just to put it into perspective.

The real point here is not to defend Wal-Mart, Target, or any other of a number of major retailers that I am sure any one of us could dig up dirt on to start a campaign if we took a notion. My point is to remind each and every person who is considering a boycott of a retail chain to stop and think of the implications. WakeUpWalmart.com starts their big video campaign with a picture of what appears to be an open Bible and a reference to Luke 6:31 which says “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” according to the NIV on BibleGateway.com. What WakeUpWalmart.com is doing here is trying to play the self-proclaimed Christians against Walmart the company. They make it sound like you would help the poor employees, but what if things do not go as WakeUpWalmart.com wants? Have you considered your fellow brothers and sisters in Christ who might be affected if Walmart gives in to the demands of this campaign in a little bit different way than WakeUpWalmart.com is asking?

Let me build a very simple scenario for you. Let’s say you live in a community where Wal-Mart is the largest employer. Never mind how that came to be, but just imagine a place where this is true. Now let’s say that Wal-Mart employs 200 people at that location where 50 are full-time and 150 are part-time. Now let’s say Wal-Mart decides to give health care benefits to more of their employees by making half of those 150 employees full-time. It is very likely at that point that some or even all of the remaining part-time employees will be laid off or have their hours reduced significantly. How do you feel about supporting a movement that could be responsible for ripping the financial rug out from under as many as 75 families in your local area?

This line of thinking is what made me reconsider my stance on big retailers this Christmas season. I am not sure what the underlying motive is for the WakeUpWalmart.com campaign, but I am sure that I don’t want to be a part of it. I have friends who work part-time at Walmart and other large retail stores. I do not want to be responsible for fueling a fight that could ultimately put them on the street. I am doing unto them as I would have them do unto me. I am sure that if my friends are that worried about the benefits or lack there of, then they will try to move to another job or take it up with their employer.

I know that Wal-Mart is a hot topic in a lot of communities. The bottom line is that Wal-Mart stores are a great asset to many communities even in places where they don’t like to admit it. These big stores are able to provide prices that small specialty stores would never be able to compete with in this day and time. Those lower prices also fuel my point. If Wal-Mart were to give in and raise prices a few percentage points then what harm would that do? Well, do you know anyone on a strict budget? I do and every single penny counts. So the idea of getting Wal-Mart to raise prices for all shoppers to help a group of part-time employees get health care benefits might hurt more people than it helps. A increase of a few pennies on each item could add up to someone not getting to eat a meal. Is that how you want others to do unto you? Do you want to see struggling families give up meals for this cause?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 at 12:11 am and is filed under Faith, News, Wal-Mart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.