Walmart: A Critical Analysis of its Sustainability and Ethical Practices

This discussion explores the complex nature of Walmart's operations, examining its strengths in scalability and sustainability while critically analyzing its shortcomings in ethical practices. We delve into the arguments presented by Visser, Osterndorf, and Saari et al., highlighting the company's positive contributions alongside its controversial labor practices, gender inequality, and environmental concerns. The discussion also examines the concept of inferior goods and their role in Walmart's market sustainability.

Discussion Forum Answers:
1. The retail corporation Walmart is an American corporation, which has thousands of stores all
over the world. The organisation is doing well in many fields like providing good quality
materials, nutritious food and edibles. The brands that Walmart's products belong are of high
quality. Walmart provides good service to the customers and has well-behaved employees. The
organisation is serving whole world by providing grocery items. But the issues are Walmart does
not include pregnant women in its staff, underpays women and also faces hundreds of lawsuits
from its employees because of wages issues. Some issues related to high price products are also
found.

2.
Pros of Walmart Cons of Walmart
 It is a corporation that follows the
concept of scalability and sustainability
(Visser, 2012).
 Gender Inequality and race
discrimination.
 The rate of sustenance of Walmart is
100%.
 Cases against anti-employee policies.
 High quality products.  Not safe environment for employees.
 Available products for all the citizens  Low wages to female employees
Many authors also mentioned about the worse face of Walmart where employees are not safe as
working place is sometimes outside of cities (Osterndorf, 2015). While others stated that
Walmart is racist for women and older employees.

3.
a) According to Visser’s Scalability concept about Walmart, the organisation is growing to
new heights despite of many issues and complaints faced from consumers and
employees. The organisation is launching new products, deals and brands to enhance the
economy as well as size of market shares. The company is highly scalable and
sustainable in order to sustain in the market and give competition to other competitors.
b) Visser has generally a positive view about Walmart as he mentioned about all the pros of
the organisation. He also mentioned its sustainability and scalability rate of the
organisation. Despite of many cons and issues related to Walmart, still Visser stick to
Wal-Mart’s pros only. As described in his articles and books “Walmart is the only
example of 100% sustainability rate in the market”. He described Walmart as a
marketplace of no competitors.
c) The attempt of fair trade and other moves to make eco-friendly environment launched in
order to make more sustainable products for environment. Fair trade of other products
like coffee should be promoted to launch more eco-friendly products in the market.
Launching eco-friendly products are benefits to CSR and known as environmental or
green CSR. It is benefitting to the CSR because products are healthier to environment as
well as customers. So, this concept will not harm the environment through the business
schemes (Saari, et.al., 2017).
d) The goods that people buy at lower income times rather than at high income times are
called as inferior goods. These goods play an important role in the market sustainability.
As for example Walmart consist of such goods, then the customers of Walmart are not
only rich people. There are some people whose economy status remains the same whole
year, so they can easily buy such products. This strategy will help Walmart to sustain in
market at the down times.

References
1. Osterndorf, C., 2015.[Online] 10 reasons Walmart is the worst company in
America. The daily dot.[ Available at]: https://www.dailydot.com/via/walmart-labor-
unions-bad-company/. [Accessed on : June 25’2018].
2. Saari, U, A., Baumgartner, R, J., and Makinen, S, J., 2017. Eco-Friendly Brands to Drive
Sustainable Development: Replication and Extension of the Brand Experience Scale in a
Cross-National Context. MDPI.
3. Visser, W, 2012. The future of CSR: Towards transformative CSR, or CSR 2.0. SSRN
Electronic Journal.