Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the world, for many years it has led the ranking of the most powerful companies in the world, according to Forbes and Fortune 500. Wal-Mart success is a product of offering the lowest prices on the market. Therefore, thousands of consumers choose this retailer over other ones. The company was founded in 1962 by Sam Walton, an Arkansas businessman who decided to open a small store to meet the needs of the residents of his city. Little by little, the business was expanding, arriving in 1980 to be one of the few companies to have an approximate income of 1 trillion dollars; In addition to having 276 stores and employing more than 21,000 people. In 2012, 50 years after its inception, Wal-Mart employs more than 2.2 million people, serves 200 million customers each week, and has more than 10,000 stores in 27 countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, United Kingdom and of course the United States. This incredible growth came with criticisms and charges of a bad working environment as well as irresponsible practices, discrimination, among others.
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Yet there has been very little change in the company’s behavior. In my opinion, the size alone makes Wal-Mart vulnerable to many issues. It has to be incredibly difficult to create an effective human resources department that can address all employees’ issues. Obviously, the biggest and probably the real problem is that Wal-Mart’s executives focused only on increasing profits and they have no interest in improving the working environment. They benefit from having low minimum wage and they take advantage of loopholes in the labors law to cheat employees out of wages and