I love Walmart and shop there all the time. It's not a perfect company of course, but in the net Walmart is a huge boon to humanity and the planet.
Walmart and its Big Box friends are making the world a greener, more sustainable place. This isn’t because of any PR stunts or corporate green initiatives they may have going; it’s because they are relentlessly focused on profit and efficiency. It is their cutthroat capitalism not their sense of corporate citizenship that will save us — if anything can.Walmart is helping to save the planet because it’s tough and realistic and focused like a laser on the bottom line. Giving customers what they want at low prices has made Walmart an irresistible force in the market. Every sock factory in China, every flatware manufacturer in Bangladesh wants to crack the Walmart market. Some purchasers buy by the crate and the carton; Walmart buys in the millions and billions.
But there’s a catch. Walmart wants to sell cheap to its customers; that means it must buy cheap from producers. And Walmart isn’t loyal; what have you done for me lately? is what its buyers want to know. Maybe last year you sold them ten million pairs of men’s shorts; if you want to repeat that you are going to have to be the low bidder yet again. If the factory across town (or across the ocean) figures out a way to make shorts that meet Walmart’s specs for two cents a pair less than your price — it’s goodbye to those ten million sales.
That means you, and everyone else trying to sell to Walmart, have to spend all your time figuring out how to produce the same product with less. Walmart’s ruthless focus on reducing prices is driving producers everywhere to cut the costs of production: to switch to cheaper materials, use less packaging, cut down on waste of all kinds and to consolidate and rationalize both production and distribution. The result is a steady and inexorable decline in humanity’s impact on the environment for every unit of GDP.
Saving money means saving energy, reducing waste, and increasing efficiency. When you shop at Walmart you're doing your part to save the earth!
