The Hometown Advantage - Wal-Mart Depresses Wages, Study FindsThe study "focuses on stores that opened between 1992 and 2000 and concludes, "Opening a single Wal-Mart store lowers the average retail wage in the surrounding county between 0.5 and 0.9 percent."
Currently, more than of Wal-Mart's employees earn less than $10 an hour.
Think about that for a moment. This is the world's largest company and the majority of its employees earn less than $10 an hour. They made $11.2 billion in profit last year, they can afford to pay a (more) livable wage. They choose not to because it would cut into their profits, which makes them greedheaded jerks.
That is both pitiful and infuriating.
The rest of the article has quite alot of interesing and useful information (among the juicy bits is the breakdown of raising their wages and the effect it would have on consumers, which is to say not much).
I'm not anti-Wal-Mart per se, I'm anti-exploitation and Wal-Mart is the world leader in worker, supplier, locality and consumer exploitation. And they do it on purpose to make every last penny they can for their stockholders.