Walmart Set to Implode Next Year

by George-Luis Dewey

December 15, 2009

Walmart has gone through some significant changes in the last year and none of them bode well for the corporations future, but the effect they will have on the economy and the people that work there will be worse.  When the economy went in the can the store experienced a small down turn, but soon people were lulled into spending more and the public seemed to be forgetting the potential seriousness of the nation’s predicament.

Many of us questioned the wisdom of bailing out the same gangsters that purposefully torpedoed the economy and although the focus was on banks, Walmart was feeling the crunch.  The first move they made seemed to make no sense at all.  They actually raised many prices across the board and that was cruel to the people who struggle the most to stay afloat.  And yet the public didn’t seem to notice much,  In a time of economic stress when the economy is shrinking if you want your country to recover you lower prices and make it possible for your customers to stay with you and it may be necessary to let people go, but you don’t choose a time like that to expand or overspend.  But Walmart was  content to just keep siphoning money that would soon be missed out of the community.  It’s bad enough that they keep the bulk of their employees limited to only 30 hours a week and that they let the Public pick up the tab for healthcare for temporary and part time employees.

The next thing they did puzzled me, because they seemed to be moving in precisely the opposite direction from that indicated by any good business sense.  They remodeled their store and gutted a lot of the competitor brands replacing them with their “Great Value” generics.  I’m sure that didn’t help other companies much, because Walmart got bigger and their shelf space was gone a long with their market share.  And then some of the prices went even higher.  The banks went on to “recover”, but Walmart did not enjoy the same fate.  She had made several mistakes and now they had dug themselves into a hole with their greed.   They had to pay for the remodels and they had over expanded gambling on a guaranteed market for their generic brands.  Furthermore, the company was not honest about the state of their finances and they have been concealing the real state of their companies finances. 

As of December 13th Walmart is down 57 percent in the Western Region and down 50 percent on average nationwide in sales.  Rather than allowing the public sale prices and dumping excess merchandise they have been concealing the excess merchandise in trailers behind the stores.  The reason they are doing this is because they don’t want the public to know the real state of affairs as it would cause their stock to plunge. 

Since the Third quarter they have failed to tell the government what their sales have been in order to delay the effect of this until after the holidays.  They went from filing weekly, to every month and and that only lasted a month, then they said they would file quarterly and that won’t happen until the end of the year.  By then it will be too late for the suckers who buy their stock, the wage slaves who work there and the poor public who buys there.   Again another way to grab the publics money on two fronts.  First by charging artificially inflated prices while they can and cheating the public out of money on worthless stock.   That giant sucking sound you hear is all the money they are draining from an unsuspecting public.

I suspect that they are attempting to sell of a lot of their stock held by corporate members in the know and leave the poor investors holding the bag after the holidays.  On December 12th they let all their temporary workers go two weeks before Christmas.  And they plan to dump 100 employees in our local Walmart in Belen and as I understand that will be the case in every other store too.  The corporation added insult to injury to its own employees by doubling the price of their health care on top of everything else.  Sources inside the corporation tell me they just don’t feel they are working for the same company anymore.   

Good old Sam would certainly be rolling over in his grave.  If you work at Walmart my advice to you is file for unemployment now, because odds are you will not have a job after the first of the year.  And don’t spend all your money over the holiday unless you have funds set by for hard times, because they are on the way.  When Walmart suffers the Nation suffers. 

Do you hear any of this in Washington?  Of course not, people are more concerned with Ballon Boy and Tiger Woods and his “Woodie”  problems.  And the Media is mum on this too, since their is no such thing as a free press in America any more.   It is my humble opinion that we should dismantle Walmart and break it up into multiple business and let the employees own and manage them as a cooperative.  This company is just too big, but not too big to fail - that is already a given.   Remember you heard it from Libertysteward before any one else would be honest enough to tell you.