Watch it at Amazon
54 out of 65 people found the following review useful: Brave New Films pushes our buttons, 18 November 2005 Author: Donal Fagan from Baltimore MD, USA
I had a generally low opinion of WalMart before, and Brave New Films' documentary only made them seem worse, but I still have questions. WM is well known for persistent, and often illegal, anti-union activity, which is reported in this film. WM is also known for beating down prices, which is not reported. I didn't know that WM has high turnover, or that many stores are purposefully under-staffed.The sad stories of the losing competitors do not sway me. Mom and Pop operations of all kinds have been giving way to big box operations for many decades. Olive Garden killed my favorite local Italian restaurant, Lowe's is killing my favorite local hardware store and a planned Home Depot will finish the job. That is just competition in the developed world.What annoyed me were the subsidies and tax breaks that WalMart manages to get from localities. In one case a WM is shown skipping across the town line, abandoning the subsidized big box stores, just before their sales taxes kick in. But more annoying was a lack of perspective: How many big chains and franchises get subsidies? If many do, that would be the logical counter-argument, so I'd like to have gotten the information.I was also annoyed that WM employees were on public assistance of some kind, but again: How common is this in retail? Do KMart employees get a lot of public assistance? Or not? Apparently there is a lot of crime in WM parking lots. Is there less crime in Walgreen lots, or more? Brave New Films doesn't say. WM sells products from Chinese sweatshops. Hey, even I know they aren't the only ones. WalMart's habit of stockpiling lawn products in the parking lot often leads to toxic runoff, but they aren't the only ones that do that, either.I still think that WalMart is a very bad employer, and now I know how much of a drain they are on the local economy, but I think Brave New Films failed to demonstrate whether WalMart is all that much worse than the other businesses on the strip, or simply the biggest of a bad lot. Either way, that would be good to know.
35 out of 49 people found the following review useful: for those who aren't afraid to look, 20 November 2005 Author: Jason Bednarz (jasonbednarz@hotmail.com) from United States
if you have concerns about the corporate structure and its inherently psychopathic nature (profit at any cost), this movie should pretty well confirm your suspicions and make us all realize that if this system plays itself out to its logical end, it is not going to be a pretty picture....unless, of course, your name is Walton and you have your own personal underground nuclear shelter/compound. Either the corporate world will beat us all into submission or the next great revolution will take place against it... it will of course be up to us all to decide which. A nice compliment to this movie would be the Corporation, which really delves further into the issues of the nature of corporations and how they have become the exact opposite of what they were intended to do in the first place, which was to serve the PUBLIC good.
35 out of 49 people found the following review useful: Must See, Important Message, 18 November 2005 Author: susan-225 from Eugene, Oregon
I saw this tonight in a screening at our local community college with the producer present. It was a huge, standing room only crowd, and it was clearly a hit with the viewers. Producer Robert Greenwald uses an interesting device of running a rah-rah speech of WalMart's CEO at a company meeting, with the CEO bragging about all of WalMart's great policies towards employees, the environment, customers, etc., alternated with clips of dozens of ordinary people testifying to quite the opposite. The stories of small town businesspeople having to close their family stores were especially poignant, as well as the interviews with exploited overseas workers in Walmart's sweatshops. Even one of the company's plant inspectors said he just cried when he went back to his hotel after his first inspection.Full of astounding facts about the true costs of WalMart, the over two billion dollars it has cost US taxpayers in subsidies, welfare programs for underpaid employees, etc. It became very clear that, whether or not you shop there, it's costing you money, money that's going right into the pockets of the Walton family. It's costing all of us our way of life.Quite an eyeopener. I, for one, plan to never patronize WalMart again.
36 out of 55 people found the following review useful: Wal Mart Pays Disgustingly Compared to Costco, 18 November 2005 Author: SCronin123 from Southern California
There are some "viewer posts" on this site that are fake. Someone at WalMart's rapid response team is posing as a Wal Mart employee, and providing facts regarding how wonderful Wal Mart is.One fact I know is that COST PLUS pays its employees a respectable wage, and WAL MART does not. In one study, WAL MART's SAM'S CLUB STORE was found to pay its employees A $11.52 per hour, while COSTCO paid its employees $15.97, 40% Less. (Source: Business Week Online April 12, 2004) Note: I am NOT associated with any business, labor group, political party, association, or group of any kind. I'm just sick of WAL MART paying its employees disgusting wages, and then paying politicos big money to provide RAPID RESPONSE PUBLIC RELATIONS sound bites, attempting to defend the indefensible. They should start by not lying about who them are, when they post submissions on IMDb.
19 out of 30 people found the following review useful: "Store Wars" redux: A corporate cancer that feeds on America, 22 November 2005 Author: (roland@atkinsononfilm.com) from Portland, Oregon, United States
Robert Greenwald, a hard-hitting political activist documentary filmmaker ("Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War"), comes out swinging in this incisive exploration of the retail marketing behemoth.This film is the perfect sequel to Micha X. Peled's documentary, "Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town," shown on PBS in 2001. That film focused on a single community, Ashland, Virginia, showing the strategies Wal-Mart used to buy its way in, essentially bribing the town council, strapped for cash for urgently needed civic projects, and the extensive though in the end ineffectual efforts of townspeople to stop the building of a W-M superstore in their town. Two of the worst blights caused by Wal-Mart, unfair labor practices and the killing off of long established small businesses that had been the backbone of the community, are highlighted.Greenwald picks up where "Store Wars" left off, looking at other worrisome aspects of the Wal-Mart movement through a broader, nationwide lens. We learn that because staff wages and benefits are so pitifully meager, thousands upon thousands of Wal-Mart employees in numerous states qualify for and regularly receive benefits from public assistance programs, even as they work. What's worse, Wal-Mart capitalizes on this phenomenon in the most cynical possible manner. As a matter of company policy, stores offer detailed advice to employees on how to access government benefits! We taxpayers are shouldering the financial burden Wal-Mart shirks: like employees, we too are unwitting pawns in a master corporate strategy.Meanwhile, we see proof that Wal-Mart - after exacting multi-year tax concessions as part of sweetheart deals some communities make to attract stores (the opposite of the situation that was described in Ashland, Virginia) - will actually relocate a store to land barely outside the town boundaries just before tax breaks are scheduled to end, leaving a useless hulking shell of a building and zero local tax obligations behind them forever.We learn about Wal-Mart's approach to unionization efforts. There is a specialized managerial swat team based at W-M headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. When news arrives that significant union organizing activity has begun at a particular store, the following day the union-busters are dispatched in a company Lear jet. The local store manager is reassigned and one of the team takes over. The others work to identify union activists and arrange for their swift dismissal. We also get more evidence, in case anybody needs it, about unfair labor practices. W-M defines full time employment as 28 hours/week, and often forces employees to work "off the clock" to get tasks achieved without providing any overtime pay.We also learn about the cavalier stance W-M has on crime. Millions are spent on in-store video monitoring to prevent theft of goods. But it's a different story out in the vast and often poorly lit Wal-Mart parking lots. Here, nationwide, huge numbers of assaults, robberies, rapes and other crimes take place. Guess how much W-M spends for parking lot surveillance? You're right: nada, even when pushed and after agreeing to pay for regular patrols of lots, which make a huge positive difference, W-M often drags its feet in implementing reforms.This film, like other Greenwald films, is skillfully crafted. He shows us a lot of talking heads, but not the usual suspects, i.e., the experts. Instead the heads are those of small business owners, their spouses, families and employees. And former Wal-Mart employees, including some who had held key managerial positions for nearly 20 years, real former insiders. We meet these people on their own turf. The wife of one businessman talks to us in her kitchen, ironing clothes all the while. It is a highly viewer-friendly approach to interviews. We also get statistics, usually in small, digestible batches, but sometimes in large amounts presented too rapidly to fully take in. A problem with a number of the interviewees' assertions and other material presented as factual is the lack of corroboration or presentation of other viewpoints. But this is in the nature and tradition of propagandistic documentaries. Such films rarely tell "THE" truth; rather, they tell "A" truth, a particular slant on important matters, what filmmaker Werner Herzog has called "ecstatic truth," or essential truth.Greenwald has taken a grass-roots approach to distributing this film. Rather than seek out conventional big screens, he arranged for an Internet approach to recruitment of individuals and groups to host DVD screenings in a huge variety of settings, all in the same week. Churches, NGOs, university campus venues, some theaters, you name it. My wife and I saw the film at a private home in our area along with 10 other people, all arranged via the film's website.As long as consumers think only of their own bottom line – buying everything they want at the absolute lowest price every time, never connecting the dots between low price, lousy service, substandard employment conditions, financial drains on the public sector, and the loss of fondly recalled small businesses - Wal-Mart will continue to eat away at our culture, parasitically suck away on our national nutrient resources, all the while building up its corporate treasures into a war chest to combat any and all challenges to its destructive excesses. There's no end in sight. My rating: 7.5/10 (low B+). (Seen on 11/18/05). If you'd like to read more of my reviews, send me a message for directions to my websites.
24 out of 40 people found the following review useful: Important Subject, Ham-Handed Presentation, 16 July 2006 Author: phantoboy from United States
I'm a liberal, anti-big-bully-business bleeding heart. Nobody dislikes Wal-Mart, and the amoral, vicious corporate attitude of which they certainly are the apotheosis, more than I. So I was more than a bit disappointed to discover that this film wasn't made for me and my well educated friends, nor does it invite its perhaps less well versed viewers to think fully and carefully about the issues from the ground up. It is a hammy, manipulative, awkward screed, that takes an important issue and shoves it through the left-wing version of a right- wing low brow attack ad.The pacing is clumsy. The editing is herky-jerky, the real-life victims are presented in a mawkish, stereotyped fashion, the music is jarring, syrupy, preachy, melodramatic and frequently too loud to hear the simultaneous dialogue. The fragments of conversation with interviewees are sometimes hard to decipher - expressed in sentence fragments and mumbling disconnection. The statistics are too often presented without adequate context, without appropriate reference points for comparison. An isolated total dollar amount or employment number is not revealing without some reference data, and that is most often missing here.All I can think is that the producers want to appeal to the right-leaning, flag waving, rural America crowd by pushing all the buttons that the new GOP does, to get their atavistic outrage going and impel them "into the streets" - instead of appealing to the sober intelligence they actually can display when given a fair chance and a dignified explanation of the facts. It is, ultimately, a shallow and condescending film.With our allies imitating the worst tactics of our adversaries, what are we to say? Well, for one, see the "Frontline" documentary. Then "hit the streets."
14 out of 21 people found the following review useful: Some interesting segments, but mostly a very one-sided hit piece, 4 February 2006 Author: lori-143 from United States
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
I was eager to see this documentary, especially since I've liked other of Robert Greenwald's films, and I was terribly disappointed with its poor quality and one-sidedness. This movie can hardly be called a documentary, because it's so blatantly biased. I do not like Wal-Mart and haven't shopped there for years, but I believe its story can be told without resorting to such obvious manipulation. I agree that Wal-Mart has hurt many of the communities where its superstores have been built, and most of the film's segments reflect this. Although some of these segments were truly eye-opening, many of its points merely repeated the same assertions in what felt like a heavy-handed way. Also, the film draws a number of spurious conclusions. For example, would the money spent to subsidize new Wal-Mart stores in some communities have been earmarked for education in the absence of Wal-Mart? The film presents no real evidence that it would. Along with its polemical content, muddy sound quality during some segments and poor organization overall added to my opinion that this is one of the worst documentaries I've ever seen.Frontline offers a much better Wal-Mart documentary, "Is Wal-Mart Good For America?" which presents the issues in a much better organized, less manipulative way.
32 out of 57 people found the following review useful: Don't Buy This DVD at Walmart, 8 November 2005 Author: gryffindor249 from United States
I wonder how this will play in the Red States, when they see the heartland raped and pillaged by The Walton family. When they see God-fearing, flag-waving patriotic Americans whose lives have been decimated by this Evil Empire in a Big Box. People might think that a documentary like this is the territory of the "Liberal Elite," but the liberals can live in their sophisticated cities where Walmart's presence cannot make quite as big a gaping hole in the local economy...but it is the rural, Bush-voting Red Staters that should be leading the rallying cry against this company. It is especially effective to see ministers preaching about how Walmart's values are not in line with the Christian faith.Obviously, the creators had an opinion before they started this documentary, but the findings and facts are consistent with what the mainstream media reports about the way this company is run. The long arm of Walmart is dramatic enough without necessitating the filmmakers occasional lapses into melodrama, but the points are well-made and ignoring the facts presented in this film and continuing to support this Goliath in a blue smock could be our undoing-I hope this gets passed around from person-to-person faster than the Paris Hilton sex video and also hope we soon see a documentary on how Walmart collapsed like the Roman Empire.
16 out of 27 people found the following review useful: Worthwhile film, but a bit clunky..., 15 November 2005 Author: dzagar from Fairfield, CT
Another strong message by Robert Greenwald of "Outfoxed" fame. Similar to that doc, however, it is a quickly done, and somewhat less than fully polished film. Too shticky at times, it occasionally comes close to a parody of propaganda films, especially when dealing with the lives of Chinese workers. However, there are some moving portrayals of those affected by Walmart, including former employees, and some powerful testimonials by former management who feel betrayed by a company they gave their loyalty to.I was most shocked by some facts about the Walton family, who are some of the richest people on the planet, and apparently some of the stingiest. You'd think they'd be more generous just for to get positive P.R., even if they couldn't care less about "the little people". For a more sober depiction of the Walmart phenomenon, I also recommend the Frontline documentary "Is Walmart Good for America".
13 out of 22 people found the following review useful: By-the-Numbers Effort..., 8 September 2006 Author: jonathon_naylor from Manitoba, Canada
There is a case to be made against Wal-Mart, but this cheaply made, by-the-numbers effort doesn't do it in a very interesting way. WAL-MART: THE HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE is not so much a documentary as it is unabsorbing propaganda. At least when Michael Moore presents something ridiculously slanted, he's entertaining about it.Still, this (presumably) low-budget effort does have its moments, from the emotional closure of a family hardware store to the insight from former employees of the big "W". But it's hurt by its lack of rebuttal to the many good things say about Wal-Mart. If the anti-Wal-Mart arguments are so strong, why not bring in a dissenting voice and try to prove why he's wrong? Lefty director Robert Greenwald apparently saw no reason to bother because when you're right, you're right. By the way, this film is unlikely to change your opinion of the retail behemoth.
Add another review
