since i think it’s safe to assume that most of my friends or website visitors would never read any articles from a fast company magazine while sitting at work, i thought i might share some fun facts from a happy little piece on wal-mart i read this morning (a condensed version of this article).

• wal-mart is the world’s largest retailer, and largest company. larger than exxonmobil, GM, or GE, selling 244.5 billion in goods last year.
• they sell more in three months what #2 retailer, home depot, sells in a year. they sell more than category-competitors target, sears, kmart, j.c. penny, safeway, and kroger combined.
• last year, 7.5 cents of every dollar spent in any store in the united states (other than auto parts stores) went to the wal-mart.
• as a result of their immense leverage, no one wants to end up in what is known by vendors as the ‘penalty box’ — punished or excluded from store shelves for saying something bad about wal-mart, or failing to meet performance standards. said one consultant, ‘you won’t hear anything negative from people. it’d be committing suicide. if wal-mart takes something the wrong way, it’s like saddam hussein. you just don’t want to piss them off.’
• since proclaiming in the 80’s and 90’s to ‘buy american’, wal-mart has doubled its imports from china in the past five years ($12 billion in 2002). this makes up nearly 10% of all chinese exports to the US.
• huffy bicycles at one point had to give designs for its high-end, more profitable bikes to competitors in order to free up production capacity for the cheap bikes sold at wal-mart. huffy is currently the #3 bike seller in the US despite having lost money 3 out of 5 past years. wal-mart is the number one bike retailer. but 98% of bikes are now imported, and huffy has not made a bike in the US since 1999.
• levi’s jeans, after years of falling sales, began last year to sell a cheaper version of their jeans in wal-mart, who in the same year sold more clothing than any other store, as well as more jeans (their in-house brand sold almost as many as levi’s). five days before announcing a near-doubling of profits, levi also announced it was closing its last two US factories and laying off thousands. the iconic american brand, who 22 years prior had 60 US plants, will import everything by 2004.

check out the article if my summary doesn’t scare you enough, because there are several more examples. i’m pretty sure if wal-mart were a person they’d be like patrick swayze’s character in donnie darko, who everyone thinks is friendly and good and trying to help out the little guy, but really wants to eat your children or something.

[now hearing this: guided by voices – human amusements…]