In the article Up Against Wal-Mart, Karen Olsson exposes the largest retailer in the world by listing many of the retailer’s flaws such as worker mistreatment and discrimination. Throughout the article, Olsson uses anecdotes from employees that have worked at the company and statistics to support her arguments. Ultimately Olsson’s piece serves to harshly criticize Wal-Mart due to low pay wages, unpaid overtime, and gender inequality. From the start, Olsson relies on actual employee interviews to support her arguments against Wal-Mart. By introducing Jennifer McLaughlin, a young woman who has been working for Wal-Mart for three years but makes under $17,000 a year, the author builds tension between the worker and the company.
When you first walk through the doors of Shoprite, you notice the floral section. The selection of flowers, plants and bouquets is numerous and attractive to the eye. The departments of the store are thought out intensively. The produce section, the meat section, the juices and dairy products and the main course in the middle of the store, the grocery products such as junk foods and other packaged goods are put in the middle of the store. In “The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate” by Marion Nestle, the author describes grocery stores as: “You are supposed to feel daunted-bewildered by all the choices and forced to wander through the aisles in search of the items you came to buy” (pg 496).
In the essay titled “Labouring the Walmart Way”, author Deenu Parmar explains the unhealthy effects of Walmart, how to stop them, and the challenges of doing so. Parmar begins by detailing how Walmart has done little for local economies. By hiring financially vulnerable people, the franchise insures that no one would dare to unionize; thus ensuring employees will only earn the bare minimum, and thus out-competing local competition. Parmar also goes on to explain how a local community removed Walmart. They were able to do this through the use of fierce union protests that made the store unprofitable.
“Is Wal-Mart Good For America?” affords viewers a thoughtful analysis into the dubious ethical methodologies employed by the Wal-Mart Corporation. Unquestionably, Wal-Mart is not infallible and their strict adherence to low prices has pushed other companies out of business. For example, Rubbermaid, as mentioned in the documentary, fell into Wal-Mart’s paradoxical low pricing trap and forfeited into a merger with a competitor.
In this week’s lecture the theme of choice was “Consumerism and American Values”. When first hearing the word consumerism I tend to think of many things such as the economy, money, shopping, and etc. I thought it was a very interesting topic because Wal Mart was the target for this section. In the first essay titled “The Wal Mart You Don’t Know” the author attempts to persuade the audience that Wal Mart is nothing but a capitalistic company. Using the rhetorical appeals of pathos, ethos, and logos he conveys his argument that Wal Mart is capitalistic in a very good way.
She backs this up with a study by Vanessa Lobue and Judy DeLoache in which children age seven months to five years were asked to choose between a pink or blue object and it wasn’t until around two and a half that girls preference for pink became obvious. Robb then includes many quotes from Megan Fulcher, associate professor of psychology at Washington and Lee University. She uses Fulcher’s idea that gender-specific toys marketing leads to hindered learn, such as in motor skills. This article fits into my research paper because it shows that stores should rid of gender-specific marketing because it harms children and it shows that business were able to do it in the
In her article "Enormous Box Stores Are Bad for Main Street," Betsy Taylor concentrates not on the financial impacts of expansive chain stores yet on the impacts these stores have on the "spirit" of America. She contends that stores like Home Depot, Target, and Wal-Mart are terrible for America in light of the fact that they draw individuals out of downtown shopping regions and reason them to concentrate only on utilization. Conversely, she trusts that little organizations are useful for America in light of the fact that they give individual consideration, foster group cooperation, and make every city one of a kind. In any case, Taylor's contention is eventually unconvincing in light of the fact that it depends on wistfulness—on glorified pictures
These people embody not just America at its worst but the very irreparably flawed nature of the human race as a whole… And we can’t get enough of them! In this article, we’re going to be examining images of Walmart’s penny-pinching female shoppers at their
On Walmart’s website their toy section has many different filter options to pick from the first three being, category, trending, or by gender. Before I clicked on anything I scrolled to the bottom of the page where Walmart gives a little description of their toy sections, and to my surprise they included a statement that said “The most important aspect of a toy is that it appeals to your child, so let your child participate in picking out their next toy or game, whether it be a Lego Creator set or a Barbie doll”(Walmart 2016c). This gave me hope that they may be more diverse in their toy selections. I started with their gender section; which had two options boys or girls.
However, not every girl enjoys pink or fantasy lands. Some girls tend to want to go play in the mud and admire famous athletes instead of princesses. On the other hand, all of the boy’s products are dark color (such as blue, red, and green) or have media that represents a superhero or famous athlete printed on them. Not every boy will like to be dirty, participate in sports, or wear dark colors. None of the companies producing these products stop to realize boys can like princesses (or perhaps princes) and the color pink just as much as girls can.
I did my gender fieldwork observation at Walmart. I chose Walmart because I feel that this store would help me the best with this assignment. As I walked in the store, I saw a variety of different ethnicities from Caucasian to Latino to African Americans. There were also many different age groups, from babies to 60 and up. Not only was there a different amount of ages there was also a various number of genders.
This article also talks about how in the past a significantly small amount of toys were made specifically for boys and girls. Many ads for toys in the 1970s deliberately had boys playing with dolls and kitchen sets, while the girls played with toy cars and airplanes. While this was true for the 1970s, now it is more common for marketers to convince parents to buy two versions of the same, or similar toys for different genders (Robb). For example Living In Lego City, written by Alexandra Lange, talks about the difference between the brands two major cities: Friends’
I guess growing up in America, I tend to have a mindset that anything is possible. The mindset to always think that anything can be change if we fight for it or if we have the will to change it. One thing that I failed to realized when I brought up the ideas of gender roles is that, this is society and the world itself and not just me. Through this experience, it’s better to be realistic. I asked my father one day regarding gender roles in the American culture and his opinion on it since gender roles play a huge portion in my culture.
Wal-Mart is a powerful and influential grocery store in America and even in the world. It has a good reputation in terms of convenience, variety and good value for money. The greatest strengths of Wal-Mart are “the consumer understanding of low prices, their market clout, their competence in information technology, and their wide store and distribution network” (Internal Analysis of Wal-Mart 2015). The company has built good reputation among consumers during several decades’
They are designed to create more of an inclusive shopping experience where one can find anything from bargain deals on daily groceries at Big Bazaar to exquisite limited edition porcelain figurines at Lladró. It can almost be believed that malls can provide an equalizing space. The ‘equalizing’ nature of this space should be approached with caution; it is neither ‘natural’ nor ‘equal’. On the contrary, most malls become reflective of the socio-political landscape it exists within, and performs this sociality by becoming a site of reproduction of these same relational
