WALMART AND THE UN GLOBAL COMPACT

Walmart and the UN Global Compact

Walmart and the UN Global Compact

Introduction

Walmart is the largest retailer in terms of outlets in the world and retail value. In America, Walmart generally operates in hypermarkets, with around 3,000 outlets in 2011. Additionally, Walmart has outlets in the supermarkets, wholesale clubs channels and mass merchandisers. Walmart stores are best recognized for their low pricing as well as their products' diversity. The products comprise clothing, beverages & food, toys & games, footwear & accessories, consumer electronics, cosmetics and toiletries, sporting goods, and furniture and furnishings. Its website, Walmart.com, also sells products, as well as downloads of films and music. Walmart also focuses on its social responsibility. (Walmart's 2012 CSR report)

These days, in a lasting economic depression that has affected profits of businesses and deepened shareholders' stress, businesses are making innovative models of Corporate Social Responsibility. Walmart is focusing on running a self-effacing department of CSR, and hitting it on the organizational plan as a little subsidiary of the philanthropy division or PR (public relations) — several businesses are therefore attempting to implant Corporate Social Responsibility into their processes. Walmart have made determined obligations to CSR as an approach to accumulate capital and strengthen the supply chain. This paper discusses the UN Global Compact in relation with Walmart's initiatives regarding this.

Discussion

By the early twenty-first century, Walmart Stores, Inc. (currently branded as “Walmart”) had become the largest retailer in the world, the transnational employer of more than two million workers, and a company whose innovations in pricing, supply-chain management, and labor relations made it as historically influential in its time as the Pennsylvania Railroad had been in the nineteenth century, or the Ford Motor Company in the early twentieth century. Walmart helped make the low-price, big-box, discount store ubiquitous in the United States and Canada and transformed retail supply chains so as to squeeze profits and prices out of its manufacturing suppliers, thereby encouraging production in low-cost nations like China. Equally important, Walmart has made the antiunion, low-wage, low-benefit employment model it pioneered within its own stores standard practice across the retail sector of the economy. (www.unglobalcompact.org)

The company was founded in the 1960s by Sam Walton, the owner of a small chain of Ben Franklin variety stores headquartered in the small Ozark town of Bentonville, Arkansas. Following the lead of urban chains like E. J. Korvette and other northern “discounters” that used cheap prices to generate volume sales, Walton opened his first discount store in Rodgers, Arkansas, in 1962, followed by one or two additional stores each year until 1970, when a corporate reorganization and a stock offering enabled Walmart to grow much more rapidly. The chain had 100 stores in 1974, and over 500 a decade later across 20 states, most in the South and Midwest. Unlike many competitors Walton recognized that small towns—some with a population of less than 5,000—could support a large discount store because the good roads built in the postwar era enabled these big stores ...