Case Study Of Wal-Mart Stores

Wal-Mart Stores is a international corporation that runs large discount superstores and warehouse. It is the biggest retailer and the largest private company in the United States having more than five thousand stores worldwide, 80% of those are in the United States. Wal-Mart stores is at the top of the wealth 500 listing ( Adler , 1994) , it operates in more than 27 countries world-wide and is moving into new countries every year. With sales over $300 billion a year and with more than 18 million workers around the world. Wal-Mart is considered one of world’s most important Companies.

Wal-Mart was founded by Sam Walton and his brother Bud , they emerged the Discount Format in the 1950s. This low price model work involved high volume operations

Cost leadership has been the best competitive advantage of the retailer during so many years but it is also important the strategy followed by Wal-Mart when targeting the market. Its income are implemented in stores to keep follow of customers’ purchases lifestyle and so adapt the products offered into the specific need of that part of the market(Down, 2008). The successful leadership of Wal-Mart upon time made the company able to increase its sales since it was founded in 1962 in Arkansas(Asea,2005). But it growth began to decrease in 2008 when it was faced by a long list of critics(unions, human rights organizations, religious groups, environmental activists, community organizations, small business groups, academics, children’s rights groups, institutional investors) who considered that Wal-Mart represents the worst aspects of 21st-century capitalism and that it symbolizes a system of increasing market penetration and decreasing social regulation, where more and more aspects of life around the world are subject to economic competition(Amn,2004). They see that Wal-Mart’s accomplishment rests upon the incomplete damage of social power in favour of corporate power and that it takes advantage of the conditions of the neo-liberal world, from the availability of instant and inexpensive global communication to the continuing collapse of agricultural employment around the world to the rapid diffusion of technological innovation to the oversupply of subjugated migrant labour in nearly every country to the continued existence of undemocratic and corporate-dominated governments. That why, those critics accused Wal-Mart by violations of overtime laws, abuse of child labor, super-exploitation of immigrant workers, rampant gender discrimination, horrific labor conditions at its suppliers’ factories, unlawful