Impact of Walmart: Does Wal-Mart have a responsibility to the small retailers it puts out of busines

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Impact of Walmart: Does Wal-Mart have a responsibility to
the small retailers it puts out of business? Why?

Large discounts stores and superstores can wield enormous
power and impact on a local community When a mega retailer like Wal-Mart
enters a town, especially a smaller one, it often drives nearby small retailers
out of business and sends downtown business districts into a nosedive Wal-Mart
founder Sam Walton was alive, he responded as follows: “quite a few
smaller stores have gone out of business during the time of Wal-Mart’s growth
Some people have tried to turn into this big controversy, sort of a “save
the small Town Merchants” deal, like they were whales or whooping cranes
or something that has the right to be protected Of all the notions I’ve heard
about Wal-Mart, none has ever baffled me more than this idea that we are
somehow the enemy of small town America Nothing could be further from the
truth Wal-Mart has actually kept quite a number of small towns from becoming
extinct by saving literally billions of dollars for the people who live in
them, as well as by creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in our stores I
believe millions of people are better off today than they would have been if
Wal-Mart never existed I don’t want to be too critical of small town
merchants, but the truth is that a lot of these folks just weren’t doing a very
good job of taking care of their customers Whenever we put a Wal-Mart store in
town, customers would just flock to us from the variety stores With our low
prices, we ended an era 45 percent markups and limited selection We shut the
door on variety-store thinking“*

Q1 What is
your assessment of Sam Walton’s remarks? Explain

Q2 Does
Wal-Mart have a responsibility to the small retailers it puts out of business?
Why?

Q3 What does
the future look like for small retailers in America? How can they compete with
retailing giants like Wal-Mart? In Detail

See wwwemichedu/public/geo/557book/c313impactwalmarthtml