Hospitals Fear Competitive Threat From Potential Walmart-Humana Deal

wsj.com - Early-stage deal talks between Walmart Inc. WMT 1.37% and Humana Inc. HUM 0.48% are deepening anxiety in the hospital sector, which already has been grappling with sluggish growth and competition from cheaper health-care options.

Hospitals have been eyeing Walmart nervously for years as it advances into health care, seeking to leverage its enormous purchasing heft, physical reach and focus on price. The Bentonville, Ark., retailer already operates pharmacies and primary-care clinics and plans to begin offering lab-testing services. It has also recently increased its direct negotiations with hospitals for competitive prices on some procedures for its employees.

Now, a deal for Louisville, Ky.-based insurer Humana could accelerate Walmart’s transformation into a direct competitive threat and a force in tamping down spending on hospital services, according to industry executives and consultants.

A deal isn’t guaranteed. But a merger could add to the wave of consolidation in U.S. health care, pairing insurers with other sectors of the industry that offer cheaper care through clinics and pharmacies. CVS Health Corp. announced last year a $69 billion deal for insurer Aetna Inc. Cigna Corp. early last month said it would buy Express Scripts Holding Co. for $54 billion, in a combination that would marry a health insurer and the largest U.S. pharmacy-benefit manager.

“These vertical deals are super exciting, mostly for the potential to keep people out of the hospital,” said Zack Cooper, health economist at Yale University.

With a potential Walmart-Humana deal, “there is scope for this new entity to, in a sense, offer a product that has less bells and whistles and is more efficient and lower cost,” he said.

Outside its pharmacies—which operate across 4,700 U.S. Walmart stores—the retailer’s health-service offerings are currently limited. Walmart operates 19 clinics in Georgia, South Carolina and Texas and other providers operate about 50 additional clinics. But Walmart’s expansive retail footprint would make it a formidable competitor should it build out low-cost outpatient offerings, said industry executives and consultants.

Humana, one of the nation’s largest insurers, already announced in December it would jointly acquire home-health-care and hospice provider Kindred Healthcare Inc. with two private-equity firms.

A potential Walmart-Humana deal “should be a concern to everybody in health care,” said Randy Oostra, president and chief executive officer of nonprofit hospital system ProMedica, based in Toledo, Ohio. ContinueReading

Walmart is abruptly closing 63 Sam's Club stores and laying off thousands of workers

businessinsider.com: Walmart is closing 63 Sam's Club stores across the US, the company told Business Insider on Thursday afternoon, after reports of abrupt store closings began to emerge.

The closings will impact about 9,400 employees, a Walmart official said.

In some cases, employees were not told their store had closed before showing up to work on Thursday. Those employees learned their store would be closing when they found the store's doors locked and a notice announcing the closing, Sam's Club workers told Business Insider. At some stores, employees were turned away by police officers.

Ten of the affected stores will be turned into e-commerce distribution centers, and employees of those stores will have the opportunity to reapply for positions at those locations, a Walmart official said.

The remaining stores will stay open for several weeks before closing permanently. All of the affected stores were scrubbed from the Sam's Club website on Thursday morning.

Sam's Club CEO John Furner notified employees of the closures in a company-wide email sent Thursday.

"After a thorough review, it became clear we had built clubs in some locations that impacted other clubs, and where population had not grown as anticipated," Furner said in the email. "We will be closing some clubs, and we notified them today. We'll convert some of them into eCommerce fulfillment centers — to better serve the growing number of members shopping with us online and continue scaling the SamsClub.com business."

Sam's Club membership fees — which cost $45 annually — will be refunded to customers affected by the closings, a Walmart official said.

ContinueReading

Related: After bonus announcement, Walmart fires thousands of co-managers, replaces them with cheaper workers

People Are Creeped Out by Walmart's New Delivery Service

via thestreet.com - Is there such thing as too much convenience?

After Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN - Get Report) acquired Whole Foods this summer, it comes as no surprise that competing grocers are stepping up their home delivery game. But Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (WMT - Get Report) may be taking it to the next level.

The grocery supergiant unveiled a service in partnership with August Homes, a smart lock company, that would allow a Walmart delivery person to go into customers' homes to put their groceries directly into their fridges.

"What if Walmart could help busy families like mine ensure my fridge was always well-stocked?" Walmart e-commerce vice president Sloan Eddleston wrote in a blog post promoting the service. "What if we created a service that not only did my grocery shopping and brought everything to my home, but even went so far as to put it directly into my fridge?"

Of course, not everyone's onboard wit this this "in-fridge delivery," as Eddleston dubs it.

But others say it's not as creepy as it sounds.

"Five years ago consumers wouldn't have assumed they'd let a stranger drive them from the airport, much less stay in their house," said Forrest Collier, the CEO of eMeals, a platform that offers shopping lists based on recipes and loads the items into online shopping carts at Walmart and Kroger (KR - Get Report) . "Now both Uber and Airbnb are billion-dollar companies."

For now, the fridge restocking service will only be available to Silicon Valley users of August Home. Customers will get a notification through their August Home app every time a delivery person drops off their food.

Walmart now also boasts a two-day shipping program, store pickup for online orders, curbside pickup and a delivery service in which Walmart employees drop off online orders on their way home after work.

"I love everything Walmart is doing right now," said Michael McDevitt, the CEO of meal kit startup Terra's Kitchen. "When retail and e-commerce merged together, they found themselves a little behind the eight ball, but now they're going out and finding the best partners in the business and really going after innovation."

McDevitt told TheStreet that Walmart is ahead of the curve compared to its competitors like Kroger and Target Corporation (TGT - Get Report) , but, he added, "once Walmart does something, all the others will follow."

Of course, because grocers aren't known for their innovation, it's likely that consumers will see more partnerships between them and savvy e-commerce companies, as well as a foray into meal kits, the experts said.

Google and Walmart are partnering on voice shopping in a challenge to Amazon’s Alexa

via recode.net - Alexa, how do you spell “competition”?

Google and Walmart have entered into a partnership to make hundreds of thousands of Walmart products available to purchase through the Google Home voice-controlled speaker, the tech giant’s answer to the Amazon Echo, the companies told Recode on Tuesday.

Owners of the Google Home gadget will be able to order one item at a time from Walmart completely by voice, or add multiples items to an online shopping cart for larger orders, and complete the purchase via the Google Home app later on.

Google first introduced voice shopping to Google Home earlier this year with partner retailers like Costco, Walgreens and PetSmart in a bid to offer commerce functionality like Amazon’s Alexa voice service already did.

In late September, Walmart will join those retailers in the program as well as on the Google Express shopping marketplace, which started out as a same-day delivery service in a handful of markets but has since expanded to include more traditional shipping speeds from partner retailers so that the service could cover the entire contiguous U.S.

On both sides, the partnership seems like a smart hedge in the event that shopping by voice actually takes off. For Google, Amazon has already emerged as an unlikely foe as more and more online shoppers start their product searches on Amazon instead of on the traditional search engine, where Google is used to placing lucrative ads alongside those type of search results. A study last year found that 55 percent of U.S. adults start their online shopping trips on Amazon.

And if voice commerce becomes popular and shoppers actually start searching for products by speaking to a device, Walmart is perhaps the only retailer in the U.S. that comes close to offering the breadth of Amazon’s product catalogue. (ontinueReading

Related:  Amazon Cutting Whole Foods’ Prices Cost Other Grocers $11 Billion In Value

TRIGGERED: Wal-Mart back-to-school sign hung above guns, sparking outrage

via cnbc.com - Wal-Mart is catching fire for a guns display at one of its stores, after a photo went viral on Wednesday of the sign that hung above it.

The photo shows a back-to-school banner that reads "Own the school year like a hero" situated above a glass case full of guns.

"What's seen in this photograph would never be acceptable in our stores," a Wal-Mart spokesperson told CNBC in a statement. "We regret this situation and are looking into how it could have happened."

Initial reports said the store was in Evansville, Indiana, but that has not been confirmed by Wal-Mart as of Thursday afternoon. They had started their investigation midday Wednesday, after the photo began circulating.

The customer who initially tweeted out the photo and who also spoke with The Washington Post has since taken her Twitter account private.

The woman, Leeanna May, insisted in an interview with the Post that the photo was taken in Evansville.

But Wal-Mart's latest tweets to unhappy customers tell a different story. It appears there is still some confusion regarding which store the sign was seen at.

This isn't the first time Wal-Mart has come under a viral attack for its products.

In July, Wal-Mart used a racist term to describe a wig cap sold online. Sold by a third party, the color of the hat was listed as "nigger brown."

The retailer also drew fire in 2016, prior to Sept. 11, when a store used Coca-Cola products to build two towers signifying the World Trade Center. A banner reading "We will never forget" hung above it. (ontinueReading

Related: Walmart says back-to-school gun display was a prank

View image on Twitter

Texas: 8 dead, about 30 injured found in hot semitrailer in 'human-trafficking' incident

abcnews.com - Eight people were found dead and close to 30 others injured inside a brutally-hot semitrailer parked in a Walmart parking lot in San Antonio, Texas.

Police described the incident as an apparent "human trafficking crime."

Authorities became aware of the truck overnight after a Walmart employee, who had been approached by someone who had been in the truck asking for water, notified police of the interaction, San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said this morning at a press conference, alongside other officials from the city.

Inside the semitrailer, authorities found eight dead bodies, as well as 20 other people who were in "extremely critical condition or very serious condition," and eight others suffering lesser injuries like heat stroke and dehydration, San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood told the press this morning.

There were 38 people inside the truck in total, McManus said, and Hood added that at least two of them were "school-age" children.

The truck had no working air-conditioning system, and temperatures topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit, Hood said. McManus added that the truck's pass lacked access to water.

"They were very hot to the touch," Hood said of the people found inside.

The driver of the truck was arrested and could face federal and state charges, according to police. The driver's name was not given at this morning's press conference.

"We're looking at a human-trafficking crime here," McManus said.

Meanwhile, surveillance video from the store showed that a number of vehicles entered the parking lot and "picked up lots of folks that were in that trailer that survived the trip," McManus said.

Some of the people who had been in the truck also ran into the woods, he said. The area was searched, and another attempt will be made in the morning, the officials said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement has also been called in to help investigate the incident, officials said.

San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood, who stood alongside McManus at the press conference, said firefighters arrived on the scene at 12:26 a.m. local time, and began pulling the people out of the truck. The injured were taken to different hospitals, some by helicopter, he said.

Authorities said they still don't know the origin of the truck, or how long it had been parked at the Walmart, and that the search for such details are part of an active investigation currently underway.

The officials said more details about the victims, including their genders and ages, would be released in a future briefing.

While he called it a "horrific tragedy," the police chief said the discovery "is not an isolated incident. This happens quite frequently ... fortunately there are people who survived, but this happens all the time,” he said. (ontinueReading

Strength!: Walmart Apologizes After a Listing on Its Site Featured a Racial Slur

fortune.com - Walmart prompted controversy on Monday July 17 after a third-party product description on its website contained a racial slur.

The mega-retail chain published a description for a wig cap that listed its color as "Nigger Brown." The post sparked a reaction on Twitter.

"Umm, @Walmart we need to have a chat," the comedian Travon Free wrote.

Walmart apologized for the use of the racial slur on Monday, calling it "appalling." The retailer did not share the name of the vendor (for obvious reasons) that was selling the wig cap.

"We are very sorry and appalled that this third party seller listed their item with this description on our online marketplace," Walmart said in a statement posted on Twitter. "It is a clear violation of our policy and has been removed, and we are investigating the seller to determine how this could have happened."

Walmart eventually took the listing for the wig down from its page. Jagazi Naturals, a United Kingdom-based company listed as the wig cap seller, said that it had nothing to do with the listing.

"The real JAGAZI is a 100% black company for black people. People have often used our brand name to try and sell their products. Please be aware. Very sorry for all the distress this has caused. We are feeling the pain here as well," Jagazi said in a statement. (ontinueReading

With Whole Foods, Amazon on collision course with Wal-Mart

Reuters - When Wal-Mart Stores Inc bought online retailer Jet.com for $3 billion last year, it marked a crucial moment - the world's largest brick-and-mortar retailer, after years of ceding e-commerce leadership to arch rival Amazon, intended to compete.

On Friday, Amazon.com Inc countered. With its $14 billion purchase of grocery chain Whole Foods Market Inc, the largest e-commerce company announced its intention to take on Wal-Mart in the brick-and-mortar world.

The two deals make it clear that the lines that divided traditional retail from e-commerce are disappearing and sector dominance will no longer be bound by e-commerce or brick-and-mortar, but by who is better at both.

Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods also brings disruption to the $700 billion U.S. grocery sector, a traditional area of retailing that stands on the precipice of a ferocious price war. German discounters Aldi and Lidl are battling Wal-Mart, which controls 22 percent of the U.S. grocery market, with each vowing to undercut whatever price the others offer.

The stakes are highest for Wal-Mart. Amazon's move aims at the heart of the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant's business - groceries, which account for 56 percent of Wal-Mart's $486 billion in revenue for the year ending Jan. 31. With the deal, Whole Foods’ more than 460 stores become a test bed with which Amazon can learn how to compete with Wal-Mart’s 4,700 stores with a large grocery offering that are also within 10 miles (16 km) of 90 percent of the U.S. population.

Amazon is expected to lower Whole Foods' notoriously high prices, enabling it to pursue Wal-Mart's customers. The push comes as Wal-Mart is headed in the opposite direction - going after Amazon's higher-income shoppers with a recent string of acquisitions of online brands such as Moosejaw and Modcloth and on Friday, menswear e-tailer Bonobos. (ontinueReading

Wal-Mart employees can now deliver your online orders on their way home from work

cnbc.com -Walmart. com and Jet. com shoppers in three U.S. cities now have a new delivery person, and it's not employees of one of the major shipping companies like FedEx or UPS or a delivery start-up like Instacart or Deliv.

It's a Wal-Mart store employee.

"Unlike crowdsourced delivery, where the driver has to travel (often out of the way) to pick up the package, then drive the full distance to deliver it, our associates are starting at the same place as the packages," said Marc Lore, president and CEO of Walmart eCommerce U.S., in a blog post for the retailer.

It all works through a proprietary app the retailer built for this test.

The app matches online order delivery addresses with employees' driving routes home from work, built to minimize any more driving than what the employee would do anyway to get home. Delivering is completely voluntary, and the employees can choose when they want to deliver, how many packages they can take and what size.

"Once they're done working at the store for the day, they pick up the packages from the backroom, load them into their vehicle, enter the delivery addresses into the GPS on their phone and head towards home," Lore said.

Wal-Mart compensates the employees for it but declined to elaborate how it works.

The discount retailer said the test has only been in progress for a month but so far "hundreds" of deliveries have been completed in two locations in New Jersey and one in Arkansas.

So far, "the response from associates and customers has been great," Lore said.

Its locations and labor — some 4,700 U.S. stores with 1.3 million employees — are quite an asset that Lore has been working on further integrating with its digital operations. The retailer says 90 percent of the country's population live within 10 miles of a Walmart store.

While the retailer does not provide a delivery cost breakdown, it's the last leg — commonly referred to as the "last mile" — that is the most expensive when it comes to fulfilling and shipping online orders.

Consultant group McKinsey & Company estimates "the last mile" can sometimes be more than half of an item's total delivery cost.

Last month, Wal-Mart Stores said it would offer shoppers a discount for 10,000 online-only orders that are picked up by shoppers in store rather than delivered to their homes. The discount, Marc Lore said, is "meant to be equivalent to what the last-mile delivery costs are," which in most cases averages to about a 4 percent discount per item.

The store pickup option saves Wal-Mart delivery costs, which it passes on to shoppers in the form of discounts, but the new employees-as-delivery-service test does not offer shoppers a discount. Wal-Mart said the benefit is that most orders are delivered the next day. (ontinueReading

'I think it is a terrible mistake': Ex-Sears executive says Walmart just wasted $3 billion on Jet.com

(BusniessInsider) - Walmart's $3 billion purchase of Jet.com has largely been praised as a win for both companies, but not everyone believes it was a good idea.

Supporters say the acquisition should help Walmart improve its e-commerce business, which has been criticized in the past for falling so far behind Amazon.

Walmart's online sales were $13.7 billion in fiscal 2015, while Amazon's sales in 2015 were $107 billion.

The deal is also expected to give Walmart access to Jet's shoppers, who tend to be wealthier, younger, and more urban than Walmart's core customers.

But some people, like former Sears Canada CEO Mark Cohen, think the acquisition was a waste of money.

"I think they just spent $3 billion on an idea that they should have been able to create for themselves," Cohen, now the director of retail studies at Columbia Business School, said in an interview with Business Insider. "It looks and feels like a 'Hail Mary' pass. I think it is a terrible mistake."

Jet.com is not yet profitable, but it has grown exponentially — adding approximately 350,000 customers a month — since it launched last year.

The company, which sells household goods and groceries, offers lower prices than Amazon and free shipping on all orders over $35. By comparison, Amazon charges $99 annually for free two-day shipping as part of its Prime membership.

Jet has a unique business model — enabling customers to bundle items together or waive free-return privileges to save more money — but in Cohen's opinion, it doesn't have "any viability or any likely profitability."

"Anyone can offer prices lower than Amazon," but no one has figured out how to do as profitably as Amazon, Cohen said.

Some have speculated that the purchase of Jet.com was an expensive way for Walmart to get Jet's founder, Marc Lore, to run Walmart's e-commerce business.

In turn, Walmart could start attracting top tech talent away from Amazon, eBay, and other online retailers, according to UBS retail analyst Michael Lasser.

"Until now, Walmart probably faced some difficulty attracting the best & brightest engineers & [e-commerce] talent given its perception as a 'traditional retailer,'" Lasser wrote in a recent note to clients. "We think the addition of a rapidly growing and innovative retailer should enable Walmart to attract human capital and knowledge that it might not have otherwise been able to attain."

In announcing the news of the acquisition, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said Jet would help Walmart's website grow faster.

"Walmart.com will grow faster, the seamless shopping experience we’re pursuing will happen quicker, and we’ll enable the Jet brand to be even more successful in a shorter period of time," he said in a statement. "It’s another jolt of entrepreneurial spirit being injected into Walmart.”

But no one can be sure how it will all play out for Walmart and Jet.

"Whether it's the right strategy, or even the right company to acquire, remains to be seen," said Sucharita Mulpuru-Kodali, e-commerce analyst at Forrester Research.

(FullText)

Third World USA: Woman berates Walmart customer for using food stamps in viral video

REAGAN'S FAULT!

- A video that is going viral shows a woman berating a man for using food stamps at Walmart.

“This all started by her saying to her son ‘see this is why you go to college so you don’t take handouts,'” the YouTube description states.

In the beginning of the video, you can hear the woman complaining to the father about how she is paying for his food.

“You know, I put in 50-60 hour weeks… trying to provide for my family,” the man says.

“You’re not providing for it, I am,” the woman says. “The government is.”

“You’re not,” the man says.

“They take it out of my check,” the woman says. “Bullsh*t they don’t.”

“Contact your local senators and congressmen and issue a complaint,” he says. “Vote Republican. I’m sorry; I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Oh, trust me, I am not a bleeding heart fu*king liberal,” the woman replies.

The woman later tells the man that he must be a Bernie Sanders supporter.

“That’s who you vote for,” she says. “They give it to you, so you vote that way.”

Both customers were with their children at the time of the argument.

The video of the confrontation has gone viral, receiving more than 3.8 million views on YouTube.

The video contains strong language viewer discretion is advised 

​Do Walmart's 'always low prices' spread to nearby houses?

(cbsnews) - In American retailing, Walmart (WMT) and Target (TGT) are the two giants battling it out for consumers' wallets, with the former representing low-cost convenience and the latter the promise of style at affordable prices.

While shoppers might think of themselves as either die-hard Target fans or Walmart patrons, there's another way the two retailers are dividing America: real estate prices. Homes located near Walmart stores may be getting a bit of the Walmart slogan rubbing off on them -- "always low prices" -- while houses near Targets experience much higher appreciation, according to a new study from RealtyTrac.

Homeowners near Walmarts who sold their properties in 2015 saw a 16 percent price appreciation since they first bought their houses, with the average value of a Walmart-area home $178,249, the study found. So what about homes located close to a Target? The "tar-zhay" glamour apparently extends to nearby residential properties, given that homeowners saw a 27 percent price appreciation and average property values of $307,286, or 72 percent higher than homes near Walmart locations.

Of course, this could be a chicken-and-egg question, in that it's debatable about whether the retailer is influencing nearby home prices, or whether the home values influenced the retailer's decision to build in that location.

Both retailers target price-conscious consumers, but there are some serious differences in their typical shoppers. Take a look at the average shopper at Walmart: she's white, 50 years old, and has annual household income of more than $53,000. The typical shopper at Target, on the other hand, is 45 years old and has annual income of about $65,000.

Target, then, may be choosing more upscale locations for its stores, while Walmart might be looking to move closer to its shoppers, who might live in lower-priced houses given their lower income than Target customers.

Then again, the Walmart/Target effect on home prices might reflect a trend in American communities toward economic segregation, which is when the wealthier tend to cluster together, making it tougher for lower-income Americans to find entry into those communities. Wealthier consumers might pay more to be closer to their favorite shops, including Target and expensive grocery stores like Whole Foods.

Buyers who are concerned about their housing valuations might want to look for homes near Whole Foods or Trader Joe's, given they tend to have more rapid price appreciation, housing-data company Zillow found last year.

Still, if you don't live near a Target or Whole Foods, don't despair. There's actually an upside to living near a Walmart, RealtyTrac found: lower property taxes. Walmart-adjacent homes have an average property tax of $3,146, or less than half of what homeowners near Target pay. (Source)

Wal-Mart to Boost Wages for Most U.S. Store Workers

THE HORROR!

(wallstreetjournal) Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will give nearly all its U.S. hourly store employees—and not just minimum-wage earners—a raise next month, as the nation’s largest private employer tries to combat a tighter labor market and the turnover endemic in the retailing industry.

Wal-Mart previously said it planned to boost its minimum wage in February to $10 an hour. But the giant retailer said Wednesday that hourly workers employed in its stores as of Dec. 31 would get at least a 2% pay bump. The wage increase will affect nearly 1.2 million U.S. employees at the company’s Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores.

The across-the-board pay increase is aimed at addressing complaints by some longtime store workers about Wal-Mart’s more-generous starting wages for new hires. The company also is hoping to stem defections and the sums it spends to hire and train new employees. Wal-Mart loses about half a million store workers a year.

Minimum-wage increases took effect in 20 states last year, and several of the biggest employers of hourly workers, including McDonald’s Corp. and Starbucks Corp., have raised their starting pay.

Retail workers in the U.S. earned an average of $14.95 an hour in December, up 3.6% from a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. With the raises planned for February, average hourly earnings will be $13.38 for Wal-Mart’s full-time store employees and $10.58 for part-time workers, the company said.

Some rivals, including Target Corp., are expected to follow Wal-Mart’s lead, especially in markets where the starting wage is below $10 an hour. “We constantly evaluate our hourly wage rates and adjust based on changing conditions in each market,” a Target spokesman said.

Wal-Mart is in the costly process of trying to improve its 4,600 U.S. stores while also investing heavily to boost e-commerce sales. It has said the wage boost—including the 2% increase for those who earn more than the minimum wage—would cost about $2.7 billion over fiscal years 2016 and 2017, driving down next fiscal year’s profit by as much as 12%. Last week, in a rare retreat, Wal-Mart said it would close 154 stores in the U.S. and another 115 globally, as it weeds out weaker-performing locations.

Retail Giant Walmart is closing hundreds of stores and laying off thousands of employees

(businessinsider.com) - Walmart is closing 269 stores and laying off thousands of employees.

The move will affect more than 16,000 employees, including 10,000 in the US.

The closings include 154 locations in the US — 102 of which are the company's smallest stores, called Walmart Express, which have been in pilot since 2011.

Walmart is closing the stores to shift resources to Walmart's Supercenters and smaller-format Neighborhood Market stores.

Walmart will also shut down 23 Neighborhood Markets, 12 Supercenters, seven stores in Puerto Rico, six discount centers, and four Sam's Clubs. All the stores will close by the end of January.

Here's the list of stores that are shutting down.

* * * *
Related: America's most iconic retailers are shutting down stores and laying off thousands — and this could be just the beginning

South Carolina Woman arrested for biting off part of Walmart employee’s finger

Myrtle Beach police arrested a woman for biting off part of a Walmart Employee’s finger during an altercation early Sunday morning.

About 2:10 p.m., loss prevention officers at the Walmart at 541 Seaboard Street witnessed Carolynn Wright, 23, allegedly concealing merchandise.

Two employees tried to stop Wright as she was leaving the store. A physical altercation ensued.

According to the police report, Wright punched one of the employees in the head, causing bleeding. Wright then bit down on another employee’s finger, biting a portion of it off.

A customer witnessed the incident and attempted to call 911 but dropped her phone. Wright grabbed it and while the witness tried to get it back, Wright allegedly grabbed the customer by the hair. The customer punched Wright to free herself.

Wright fled the store and got into a van. According to the report, the owner of the van told police he did not know about the altercation. He told police that when Wright got into the car, she told him to “run.” He asked her “what?” and she said “drive.” He saw someone standing in front of his van, blocking him. Wright again told him “drive.”

Police arrived and apprehended Wright.

According to the police report, the items Wright was allegedly shoplifting totaled $40.07 and included condoms, lubricant, panties, a camisole, bra and other clothing.

Wright faces assault and battery charges.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/crime/article54245865.html#storylink=cpy

Florida: Woman arrested after riding cart in Walmart while having sushi, wine

Living the Dream!

- A Florida woman faces theft and drug paraphernalia charges after driving a motorized shopping cart through Walmart while eating and drinking items from the store.

Josseleen Lopez, 25, allegedly shot up meth and then exhibited odd behavior at a Walmart inLecanto. She had a half empty bottle of wine in her cart and ate sushi, mini muffins, cinnamon rolls, rotisserie chicken, according to the Citrus County Sheriff's Office.

The sheriff's office responded to a call from Walmart on Dec. 22 that Lopez was being held after consuming $32.36 worth of food and wine inside the store.

Deputies found three empty syringes in her possession after arresting Lopez. She told detectives that she had used the syringes earlier to inject crystal meth.

Lopez, who said she was homeless, told a deputy that "she was hungry and did not want to take any of the items outside of the store, but did consume everything she could while inside the store. She further states that she knew what she was doing was wrong, however did it anyway."

Paranoia: Walmart Desperate to Keep Further Documents Revealing Employee Surveillance Tactics From Being Made Public

(Gawker) - Last month, Bloomberg Businessweek published a big story on how Walmart tracks its employees to most effectively anticipate dissent and undermine potential organizers. The piece draws largely on documents produced in the course of discovery for a case before the National Labor Relations Board. (Walmart is accused of illegally firing labor activists.) Now, Walmart alleges, labor group OUR Walmart “intentionally disclosed documents marked and designated confidential.” The documents, according to Walmart, were protected by judicial order.

In its initial story, Bloomberg reported that OUR Walmart had provided the documents, which included “more than 1,000 pages of e-mails, reports, playbooks, charts, and graphs, as well as testimony from its head of labor relations at the time,” only “after the judge concluded the case in mid-October.”

Walmart filed a motion against OUR Walmart and the United Food and Commercial Workers union, with which OUR Walmart was until recently affiliated, on December 9th asking the NLRB not only to enter a “cease-and-decist” order but also, “absent some exculpatory explanation,” order the labor group to return the documents. According to Bloomberg, Walmart is also asking that the NLRB prevent OUR Walmart from “using, referencing, or relying on” the documents in future cases.

“We couldn’t imagine that Walmart would be happy about light being shined on these kind of tactics they’re using against their employees,” said OUR Walmart co-director Dan Schlademan. Whatever documents were marked confidential were marked so for the managers to whom they were originally addressed, he added.

“Walmart is trying to bully its way to bar any future documents” from being disclosed, Schlademan said. (Full Story)

​Walmart's China syndrome: The loss of U.S. jobs

(CBSNews) - One of the economic themes of the last few decades has been the hollowing out of the American manufacturing sector. But how has that happened, and how is the world's largest retailer playing a part?

A new study from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute takes a look at what it calls "the Walmart effect," by which it means the giant retailer's growing trade deficit with China. With Walmart (WMT) importing more cheap goods from China than it exports to that country, the retailer's actions may be implicated in an estimated loss of at least 400,000 U.S. jobs from 2001 to 2013, the study finds.

The issue isn't on Walmart's shoulders alone, of course, given that the total U.S. goods trade deficit with China amounted to $324.2 billion in 2013, of which Walmart represents a fraction of the imbalance. But with Walmart pledging to ramp up purchasing of U.S.-made goods in an effort to boost American manufacturing employment, the report raises questions about how far that pledge can go to offset a much bigger trade issue, and whether it's possible for American companies to bring back some of those lost jobs.

"Walmart has been making increasingly extensive claims it will support 'Made in America' efforts," said Robert E. Scott, the director of trade and manufacturing policy research at EPI. "Frankly the numbers are just tiny compared with reasonable estimates of the jobs displaced by Walmart's China trade."

Walmart, for its part, said in a statement that the EPI study is a "flawed economic analysis that assumes that imports equal job losses and does not take into consideration that countless jobs are added through the global supply chain, distribution and logistics, among other areas of the business."

Its pledge to buy American-made products will create 250,000 direct manufacturing jobs in the U.S., the retailer said, citing data from Boston Consulting Group.

Manufacturing jobs are the secret sauce to creating a strong middle class, especially among workers who lack college degrees. Employers paid workers in manufacturing jobs an average of almost $34 an hour in wages and benefits at the end of 2013, or a premium of almost 9 percent compared with all other jobs, according to the Manufacturing Institute, an affiliate of the National Association of Manufacturers.

But American manufacturing jobs have been gutted during the past four decades, falling from a high point in 1977 when the sector represented 22 percent of nonfarm payroll jobs to about 9 percent today, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Importing cheap goods from China is legal, of course, and Walmart shareholders could argue that the company is acting in the best interests of investors and its own employees: if it failed to take advantage of changes in global trade, then it could find itself displaced in a competitive retailing market. And many of those Chinese-made goods are produced by U.S. corporations with factories there.

Behind Walmart and other retailers' imports of Chinese goods is another, perhaps bigger, issue: the trade policies of both the U.S. and China. (Full Text)

Bernie Sanders is Declaring War on Walmart

CHANGE!

Sen. Bernie Sanders is no fan of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and there are many reasons for that:
The company doesn't provide benefits for most of its employees, and about $2.66 billion of taxpayer money goes to Wal-Mart employees in the form of food stamps and government healthcare each year.

Wal-Mart lost a class-action lawsuit alleging wage theft by making employees work through unpaid breaks and meal times, among other things.

Some have accused Wal-Mart of paying off foreign officials so they won't reveal the terrible conditions under which people labor in their overseas factories.

Not to mention the family in charge of the retail chain is incredibly rich.

This isn't the first time Sanders has spoken out against Wal-Mart. When the company announced that it would raise its bottom wage to $10.00 an hour by 2016, Sanders remained unimpressed.

“While this is a step forward and a response to grassroots activism across the country, this is nowhere near enough," he said in a press release. "Wal-Mart should raise their minimum wage to at least $10.10 an hour now and move it to $15.00 over the next several years. Struggling working families should not have to subsidize the wealthiest family in the country. Wal-Mart also should end its vehemently anti-union activities.”

Sanders called what Wal-Mart pays its employees "starvation wages." Sanders also recently distributed a Bloomberg Businessweek article about how Wal-Mart spied on its employees when there was concern that a large group of them might have been organizing a Black Friday strike, which could have been costly for the company.

In the Bloomberg article, Wal-Mart declined to comment and cited the ongoing case. This was the statement sent via email:

“We are firmly committed to the safety and security of our 2.2 million associates as well as the 260 million customers we serve each week. It’s important to remember that Walmart is the largest company in the world with 11,500 stores in 28 countries. Unfortunately, there are occasions when outside groups attempt to deliberately disrupt our business and on behalf of our customers and associates we take action accordingly.”

All of that said, Wal-Mart will still let you buy Bernie Sanders books and films in its online store.

‘Poverty Pay’ Leads Wal-Mart Employees to Steal Lunches From Co-Workers

(Via truthdig.com) 11/14/2015 Wal-Mart’s workers are so poor they’re skipping lunch, sharing the food of others or stealing from co-workers, some of them said as they announced a 15-day fast aimed at raising the company’s wages.

On Friday, more than 100 Wal-Mart employees involved in the workers organization Our Walmart began a fast to draw attention to the company’s “poverty pay.” Roughly 1,000 of their supporters joined them, and some took their fast to the doorstep of company heiress Alice Walton’s New York City apartment.

Earlier this year, Wal-Mart announced it would raise wages for about half a million of its employees to $9 an hour, $1.75 above the federally mandated minimum wage. The company said it would further increase the workers’ pay to $10 an hour next year.

The protesters say that’s still not enough to support them and demand to be paid $15 an hour and be given full-time schedules. The fasters are calling their protest the Fast for 15.

The Guardian reports:

  Tyfani Faulkner, a former Walmart customer service manager from Sacramento, California, who worked for company for about five years, will be one of those fasting in protest.

“Every day there are associates who go to work with no lunch, or an unhealthy lunch, because that’s all they can afford. I have seen instances where some would eat another associate’s lunch from the refrigerator because they have nothing to eat,” said Faulkner.

“One of the things I remember most from working at Walmart was my friends and I emptying our pockets to scrape together one meal we all could share for lunch. One of my coworkers put in a dollar, another two dollars, and with my two, we could together buy chicken from Walmart’s deli to split between us. That was lunch; I don’t know if they had dinner.”

Read more here.