Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005)

Pretty Good

How sad is this?

Fantastic!

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

This was not a bad documentary by any means. Excellent points about subversive business practices were brought up and explored. The problem I had, of which others seem to agree, is that it focused so much on walmart and walmart only. True they are a little more well known than most for these sorts of subversive business practices as I have said, but they are clearly not the only company doing them. This makes the film come off as a little overly bias and, in my opinion, takes away from its credibility. Perhaps the documentary would've been better off not focusing so much on walmart and looking at the bigger picture. At times it simply seems like they're grasping at straws.Overall, however, a solid documentary worth your time if not your money.

This is a documentary about Walmart: the big US supermarket corporation which also owns Asda in the UK. You can tell by the title that the film-makers have a problem with the way Walmart operates, and this film examines some of their business practices and aims to show that there is something rotten going on.We all know how this sort of film works. There's a new breed of feature-length "issue" documentary, typified by Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9-11 and Sicko and Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me. They use a combination of humour, narration and interview footage to convince us about their cause. Even if we don't agree with their conclusions, or we doubt that they're telling us all the facts, we can still find them entertaining.Unfortunately, this movie fails on both counts. It's not particularly entertaining, nor does it do a good job of persuading. At least, it failed to persuade me that Walmart was any more evil than any large company. The main criticisms that the movie made seemed to be that Walmart is so popular that smaller businesses are driven out of town, and that they do not give their employees many perks, such as health-care. Neither argument really wins for me, and they are presented in an overly mawkish and sentimental way. Members of the public are wheeled on to give their own sob story, usually about how their health has suffered/they have lost money/their cat was killed because of the evil organisation under scrutiny. Michael Moore is often guilty of the same offence, to be fair. Then, sprinkled among the pathos, there is usually some light relief. But Walmart: The High Cost Of Low Price fails to deliver the laughs, leaving us with a movie in which a succession of people moan about nothing in particular.I expect that this film will be enjoyed by people with an axe to grind over big business, but it's easy to preach to the choir. To the innocent bystander, it's a waste of time.

I agree that this documentary Wal-Mart the High Cost of Low Price, is clearly showing us just one side of the story which as we all know is Wal-Mart= Bad and this makes it not very credible in its reporting.But I don't wanna see some lawyers and CEO's and spokespeople defend Wal-Mart and its greedy paws. Of course every giant corporation and bureaucracy operates (more or less) in a similar fashion as Wal Mart and I know they are not the only bad corporation in America and the world (just like Nike wasn't the only one with sweatshops 5 years ago) but that is not an excuse. I think people deserve and want to know all the dealings of Wal Mart and its exploitation of its workers and the corporate system in their favour. We need to know and they need to know that we know. And just because Michael Moore gave Wal Mart bad rap in Bowling for Columbine doesn't mean the story ends there- true WalMart is an easy target but again, Michael Moore never went in detail of the way Wal Mart works as a business and this is what this documentary does.For example, I am sure we are all quite conscious of the bad synonyms surrounding Wal Mart (especially about driving small businesses into bankruptcy, having sweatshops and the latest revelation of illegal workers). But all that wasn't enough for me to hate Wal Mart since it seems that today 99% of big companies operate in a similar fashion- not that it makes it right. On top of it, I would see all those happy commercials telling us Wal Mart cares about its employees and its customers, it gives back to the community yadda yadda yadda, so what is one to think? BUT then, when you finally see what Wal Mart doesn't provide health insurance for its workers, makes them use government subsidies, low wages, long hours, steals hours, discriminates against women, allows racism, intimidates and spies on its workers, anti-UNION, doesn't care about pollution...and etc, you finally get the big picture of it all.

I'm somewhat bemused by comments by viewers like Mr Donald Fagan of Baltimore. The gist of his argument seems to be that Robert Greenwald is being unfair to Wal-Mart because other "big box" stores are playing the same game. The whole point of targeting the Wal-Mart chain is the sheer scale of their operation. If the senior management team at Wal-Mart achieve their ultimate goal, pretty soon there isn't going to be any K-Mart or Sears or ....whatever. One could just as easily argue that the Alex Gibney documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" was unfair to the top brass at Enron Corporation because other technology companies like "WorldCom" and "360 Networks" were run just as dishonestly! Nobody disputes that, but again you have to take the sheer scale of the operation into account. If only sleaze-bags like Michael Moore could produce documentaries as honestly and professionally as Robert Greenwald, the industry would be all the better for it in my opinion