The first segment is focused on a family who lost their job because of Walmart. This
family had their own business, their own store. They build Independent Grocers (ITA) in 1959
with about 150 employees. Later on Walmart came. Cameron gave Walmart 1.2 million dollars
to set up another store. Small family business felt like this was unfair because the city never
gave them money for their stores. Walmart came in and there with all the funds from the city
and took out the competition. It was impossible for family owned business to survive against it.
They used their inventory money to pay their employees but then they had no more inventory.
The store was closed in the late 90s so they had about 40 years dedicated to this business, all
that hard work had to just disappear because of Walmart.
In the second segment we hear about the awful wages that Walmart was giving to their
employees. One of the examples that we see is when Edith describes her experiences working
at Walmart. She mentioned how they made employees work off the clock by threatening them.
Since Walmart didn’t allow over time, they would have their employees clock out and then finish
whatever task they were doing. This let the employees know that they were expendable, “IF you
don’t do it, I’ll just get somebody else to do it.” Another example is when Weldon said that he
literally saw managers manually changing employee times so that they wouldn’t get paid for
overtime hours. Walmart would also not give enough hours to employees who were supposed
to be working full time. This gave Walmart employees a smaller yearly wage than the Federal
poverty level! Another issue that Walmart had was hiring illegal immigrants. One of the ex
