Real Money Answers For Every Woman Walmart Collection
Real Money Answers For Every Woman Walmart Black Friday
Real Money Answers For Every Woman Walmart Black Friday

Use your Walmart Visa Gift Card everywhere Visa debit cards are accepted in the fifty (50) states of the United States and the District of Columbia, excluding Puerto Rico and the other United States territories. The Card may not be used at any merchant, including Internet and mail or telephone order merchants, outside of the United States. Get Walmart Inc (WMT:NYSE) real-time stock quotes, news, price and financial information from CNBC. But the real challenges that folks are facing is as it relates to time and money. And so what we think about when we work with companies on how to solve those problems for their employees, we think about time and money. And so in a program like this, Walmart's taken money off the table right.

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By/Nov. 29, 2016 4:01 pm EDT/Updated: July 31, 2019 2:48 pm EDT

The world's greediest, most sinister forces often dress themselves up in bright colors and smiling faces, the better to lull you into a false sense of security. While this is a common trope in fiction, where everyone expects grinning clowns like the Joker and Pennywise to be evil, it's sometimes harder to pinpoint in real life. Everyone expects politicians to lie, but the supervillains you really need to watch out for are those colossal mega-corporations, which will flash discounts, nostalgia trips, and cute cartoon animals in your face to distract you from human rights violations. It's scary stuff.

For example, take Walmart. Everyone in the world recognizes that big round smiley face. Everyone knows Walmart has the cheapest prices, the biggest carts, and can be found in every town across the United States. But once you rip off Walmart's cheery yellow mask, this corporation keeps some slimy secrets under wraps.

Wealthy family, huge company, broke employees

Okay, so Walmart is bigger than Jonah's whale. How big? According to CNBC, they've nabbed the #1 spot on the Fortune 500 list for several consecutive years, with ExxonMobil running a distant second. Thanks to Walmart's market dominance, the Waltons — that's the 'Wal' in your Walmart — are the richest family on Earth, and they're still getting richer. In 2018 alone, Business Insider reported that they'd added $11.6 billion to their net worth.

Considering that Walmart makes so much dough, you'd figure that some of those profits go back to the workers, right?

Wrong. Walmart has no interest in sharing this success with the 1.4 million U.S. workers who keep the company afloat, and Walmart employees still work long hours at low wages. Walmart HQ always says the company 'can't afford' to pay people a living wage, but that's hogwash. As Vox points out, Walmart could have easily used their savings from the controversial 2017 tax cuts to raise every employee's base rate to over $15 per hour without a sweat. Guess what they did instead? Sent a cushy $20 billion to their wealthy shareholders. Apparently that's not greedy enough for Walmart, though, because Bloomberg says they also dole out huge annual bonuses to their executives, year after year, despite prior claims that they'd stop. So no, it's not that they can't raise wages, it's that they don't care, and you don't need to be Robin Hood or Bernie Sanders to have issues with this.

Child labor and overseas sweatshops

Hey, low prices! Sweet deals! Data entry app earn money. How does Walmart afford to produce and sell such affordable bookshelves, purses, and clothing? Get a barf bag ready, because the answer is just what you were afraid of: Walmart's cheap products are often sourced from sweatshops in developing countries, where women and/or children work under nightmarish conditions.

Remember that garment factory in Bangladesh that collapsed in 2013, killing over 1,100 people? Maybe? Well, the Telegraph points out that Walmart was one of their top clients, and hundreds of girls employed by that factory were as young as 13. The situations in these sweatshops are just as abusive as you'd think. According to CNN, female workers in Walmart's overseas factories struggle through mandatory overtime, day after day, in an unsafe workplace, for minimal pay, enduring temperatures so hot that 'mass fainting episodes' are a real thing. So yes, that's why your Walmart shirt is cheap. Even in the United States, though, Walmart has gotten embroiled in an uncomfortably substantial list of child labor scandals, according to the Irish Independent, with kids as young as 5 doing demanding farm work. The Morningside Center points out that Walmart has faced multiple fines, over and over again, for this same issue.

Another key ingredient in the low prices? Prison labor

The private, for-profit prison system now commonplace in the United States is a dystopian nightmare, where U.S. citizens are handed unbelievably long sentences and then forced to work. Guess who 'employs' them? That's right, big corporations like Walmart.

Of course, Walmart doesn't directly employ prison labor. Bad for PR, you know. Instead, they use cover organizations like 'Martori Farms,' as Mic explains, which forces imprisoned U.S. women to spend long hours harvesting produce in the hot sun without water, sunscreen, or food. These prison workers, whose participation is involuntary, earn only $2 an hour. Dirt low wages mean low prices, huge bonuses for executives, and a nice little 'Made in the USA' sticker on a product. Walmart certainly isn't the only corporation doing this, according to Pacific Standard, but the next time you see that sticker, just remember, it might have been funded by modern slavery, especially if you like the price. Overseas, the portrait ain't any prettier. In 2017, according to Vox, an Arizona woman found a folded piece of paper in the bottom of her brand new Walmart purse. Opening it, the paper contained a message from a Chinese prison worker, who claimed to be surviving 14-hour work days, with frequent beatings and no lunch break, in order to produce items like her purse. Such notes can't really be verified, but Walmart does outsource about 70 percent of its merchandise from China.

Walmart loves calling the cops

You ever live next to that annoying neighbor who calls the cops every time they hear a party at your house, instead of just politely knocking and asking you to tone down the volume? Well, Walmart is that neighbor. According to the Tampa Bay Times, Walmart has become infamous for calling the cops — over and over — for everything that goes wrong, from panhandlers to someone walking out with a $3 box of eyedrops to teenagers taking joy rides on the motorized shopping cart.

Why? Because Walmart doesn't want to pay for their own security measures, of course, and they'd rather hand those costs over to local taxpayers. Across the country, local police departments are being overburdened by Walmart calls, stretching their budgets and wasting resources on petty problems, all because Walmart won't handle their own problems through the same proven methods other stores use, like better staffing and more security protocols. For the police, frequent Walmart trips means wasting time on problems that could be solved way more easily. Seriously, if you hear gunshots at the house next door, do you want to be waiting around forever because the closest cop is busy interrogating some kid over a shoplifted grapefruit?

Discrimination problems

Walmart says they're an 'Equal Opportunity Employer,' but tell that to the infinite number of discrimination lawsuits they've faced over the years. The two decades of sexual discrimination charges are bad enough, according to Bloomberg, and this mountain is topped off by the latest allegation in 2018, reported by NPR, regarding discrimination against pregnant women. The problems run deeper, though. An analysis by Fortune found that more than half of the company's job listings used male-biased language coding, and the language only got more biased the higher up it was on the corporate ladder.

Women aren't the only demographic Walmart has

Real Money Answers For Every Woman Walmart