Is Walmart Ethical? (Exploring Employees, Products, and More)

This thorough analysis delves into the moral implications of Walmart's business practices, considering factors such as labor rights, environmental impact, and supply chain management.

Walmart is a well-known company in the world today. This retailer has carved itself a place for selling the most basic household goods to electronics, groceries, clothes, and everything else you can think of.

Walmart has been in the news for all the wrong reasons, including allegations of bribery, fraud, and abuse of power. While it’s no surprise that they have their share of detractors, their business practices can sometimes be quite admirable.

Read for more information about Walmart’s ethics and how it employs its ethics to ensure employee and customer satisfaction.

Table Of Contents

Is Walmart Ethical?

There has always been conflicting information on how ethical Walmart is as a business. Even though Walmart contributes more often to charity and in the local organization, their conflict with employees questions their integrity.

Walmart offers low wages and salaries to its employees and demands unreasonable and unpaid working hours from the employees. There have also been accusations of gender discrimination where female employees are paid low.

What Are Walmart’s Ethical Principles?

Walmart majorly has three codes of ethics; Respect for all individuals, service to the customer, and working towards excellence.

Within the code of ethics, Walmart adheres to a set of guiding principles as stated in its codes of ethics. Some guiding principles include; abiding by the law, reporting data on the company practices while maintaining honesty and transparency, and acting in a manner that portrays integrity. Walmart's principles also allow external entities to consult only the manager in case of ethical questions.

Its vision statement as online e-commerce strives to achieve on a personal and community level. The vision is to ensure continuity in the community and economy while ensuring the improvement of the living standards of its employees.

Is Amazon a More Ethical Employer than Walmart?

Several published articles state the harrowing working experience of Amazon and Walmart workers. Amazon and Walmart have faced suits for failing to pay employees for the required time. A recent instance is when Amazon employees in Germany went striking over late payment.

Walmart is like Amazon as it has also had several employees' late payments and overworking cases. For instance, 15% of Walmart’s employees are on food stamps in Ohio. Studies have also shown that Walmart's operating in an economy reduces the retailers' average and aggregate incomes and the shares held by the retail workers.

Amazon’s relationships with suppliers are considered worse than Walmart's in terms of ethics. Both online stores pressure the suppliers to supply their products at the lowest price.

In Walmart, once the products are in the stores, both Walmart's and the suppliers' interests are considered ensuring the selling of as much stock as possible.

In contrast to Walmart’s agreements with its employees, Amazon has no store and technological infrastructure that ensure the costs of adding items to sell all. Amazon does not consider what you want to buy or the needs of the online partners you use.

For Instance, in selling books, Amazon stocks only the desired selection of books and promotes the specific book it offers. It means their interest aligns with the authors' or the publishers’ promoters. With Amazon, it stocks everything that is published, so they do not consider the specific book you want to purchase from them.

What Are Ethical Issues Surrounding Walmart?

The employees at Walmart receive low wages, and Walmart also shows no intentions of increasing their salaries. An average Walmart employee earns an estimated $8.00 hourly and serves 32 hours weekly. It equals $256 weekly or $13,312 within a year.

Walmart's personnel policies are also designed to keep the wages paid low. Their policies ensure that older employees are laid off, and new, younger when are put on board. There have also been recent cases of employees suing Walmart for failure to pay overtime. There have also been accusations of gender and race discrimination within Walmart, where a class of gender or race are paid low wages.

The lawsuits and accusations of Walmart make it not just a threat to low living standards but also a danger to human lives. The Amazon wage rates damage the economic development of different economies, leading to poor living standards.

Walmart is also common to inequality. This great online retailer is a significant contributor to the US economy. The US economy is described as having an enormous number of people confined to low-paying jobs with no benefits and working prolonged hours.

Low material and technological innovation and productivity. Walmart's activities does not encourage innovations. It takes business from existing firms by offering the same merchandise at a lower price.

Is It Ethical to Shop at Walmart?

Yes. Its is ethical tos hop at walmart. The company attracts customers to buy its products at lower prices. This reduces the productivity of the households because most of the household's earnings do not fit Walmart's needs. Walmart also reduces households' savings, ‌decreasing the rate of investments.

Walmart is a cultural and economic entity but proclaims free market materialism. Doing this destroys other business entities following human connection and solidarity. Its activities and business design turn humans into anomic creatures who are aimed only at searching for bargains.

Is Walmart’s Great Value Brand Ethically Sourced?

The Great Value brand was created with two goals: to make it easier for consumers to find low-priced household goods and to connect Walmart with its customers. This is done through advertising campaigns that use humour and personality-based marketing tactics, such as celebrity endorsements.

The Great Value brand has also been criticized for being unethical because of the way it sources its products. Sometimes, companies will source products from other countries where workers are paid less or not for their labour, raising concerns about whether these products are ethical.

Final Thoughts

Walmart has come a long way since its days of unethical practices. The company takes ethical issues such as animal welfare and sustainability seriously. The Walmart brand is now synonymous with socially responsible business practices.

As the global leader in retailing and e-commerce, Walmart is setting new standards for how to treat customers, employees, and suppliers alike. Walmart is working hard at improving its ethics, transparency and sustainability, a direction the company has been heading in for some time.