March 25, 2008
Read this story and see if you can even consider doing business with Wal-Mart ever again. This is disgusting. Wal-Mart makes the worst excuse here that they can’t solve this little problem. A woman gets brain injury in a car accident. It costs $400,000 some odd dollars. Her insurance with Wal-Mart paid for it. She got awarded in a settlement in the car accident. Wal-Mart’s “fine print” says that they can recoup their costs if the victims won a settlement. Legally speaking they are correct. And all the courts agreed with Wal-Mart. But here’s the rub of the whole thing. Wal-Mart makes $90 billion some odd dollars of PROFIT annually. While legally speaking they are in the right to opt the money, there is no law or policy that would restrict Wal-Mart from simply making a “charitable donation” to this grieving family, is there? They can take the legally valid money from the settlement and give it to their insurance company and out of all those profits simply give this family a nice charitable donation to show that Wal-Mart has a heart.
But they don’t.
They are as heartless as the banking world.
March 25, 2008 at 4:55 pm
It is not enough to not shop at Walmart, you should also write to their corporate offices and let them know that you are no longer shopping at Walmart!
March 29, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Thanks for sharing this despicable story of corporate greed. Two points:
1. The article actually doesn’t report $90 billion in profits; it reports $90 billion in net sales, which are sales minus a few things. One would have to subtract all of Wal-Mart’s costs to get their profits.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Wal-Mart needs the money; even if their profits were 5 billion, we’d probably feel like they made the wrong choice.
2. I think it’s fine to not shop at Walmart (and I agree with Linda’s comment), but I wonder about all the other terrible corporations that we don’t boycott. For example, lots of oil companies do terrible, terrible things. But I don’t know anyone who boycotts oil. Lots of food companies do terrible terrible things, etc. I know some people who boycott individual oil companies or inidividual food companies, but so often this is based on - for example - a single news story, with no info about whether this organization is any worse than all the others that had more luck avoiding the news.
Anyway, this is one of my ongoing internal debates. With the Walmart case in particular, we’ve seen enough news to know that they do lots of bad stuff. (Of course, does offering cheap stuff to poor people count as good stuff? Maybe not ENOUGH good stuff.)
April 9, 2008 at 4:32 pm
I don’t know if it would change your mind, but my husband just read an article that they renigged and let her keep the money. The Walmart executives aren’t spending they’re money on fancy offices or anything. In fact they have very basic headquarters. If they are “charitable” to one, they will have to be for everyone in that case, and there would be people that would take advantage and drain their profits when they see the compassion. They decided to do it anyway, apparently, so call it what you will– PR, compassion, whatever, but they get a lot of junk for what gets publicized and not a lot of credit for the money they pour into the community.