preview

Walmart Is The World's Largest Corporation

Good Essays

Background Walmart is the world’s largest corporation. Though it started out as a single store in a small Middle America town, Walmart is now the largest private employer in the United States. To minimize operating costs and maintain low prices, Walmart pays relatively low wages, provides minimal employee benefits, and contracts with international manufacturing firms in the form of sweatshops. Further, Walmart’s aggressive marketing, its purchasing power and intent to provide very inexpensive goods to the consumer has forced many local stores out of business. Despite resistance from many communities, Walmart has continued to expand worldwide with brute force. It has also taken some fairly drastic measures to keep its workforce from …show more content…

The secondary stakeholders are identified as the international, US, and local governments as well as anti-Walmart activists. As the movement towards sustainability grows, decision makers are looking for new & creative ways of doing business to benefit all aspects of the triple bottom line - people, planet, and profits (432). Let’s see how Walmart’s business strategy compares. Economic - Wal-Mart’s economic performance has been outstanding and its goal of providing quality merchandise at low cost to consumers fits well within this objective. Its stakeholders expect continual improvement to its bottom line, which is especially important to its shareholders, as they are the ones sharing in that return. “…2013, Walmart increased net sales by 5% to $466.1 billion and returned $13 billion to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases” (573). As we will discuss later on, the struggle comes when the company tries to do this in a sustainable and ethical way. Further, the company must provide fair paying jobs and profit to shareholders with as little impact as possible to local merchants. This can be done by purchasing from U.S. manufacturers whenever possible. Legal - The legal responsibility of Walmart is to run its business in a way that fully understands and complies with the local/state/federal laws that effect retail stores. These responsibilities include treating its employees fairly and protecting its shareholders with sound business practices

Get Access