Original Concept for Walmart, Case Study Example

According to the CSR, although Walmart is responsible for the economic and legal requirements that have been established by society, they are also expected to provide some amount of ethical responsibility. In this way an awareness of environmental concerns and a basic regard for their workers are some of the major issues that they face. In this sense, the fairness of their policies should be accounted for.

Fast friendly service and low prices were the initial cornerstone of Sam’s original concept for Walmart.  By elevating the ability for hourly employees to make decisions and gave them the ability to participate in the growth of the company.  Furthermore, he established his locations as comfortable well-known establishment that people felt a warm association with.  However, after his death, the stores no longer maintained this capacity for employee compensation or customer satisfaction.

After the establishment of his chain, it came to Sam’s attention that his stores were actually causing the loss of American jobs through the low cost of the products that he was importing from foreign markets.  In order to alleviate this, he started the Buy American campaign in an effort to focus consumer attention on American made products through more effective labeling. He committed to a similar strategy in his Environmental Awareness campaign.  By promoting products that were established as ecologically friendly and providing tags that detailed this commitment he was able to better educate consumers about the products that they were buying.  It seems that the efforts put forth by Sam were out of a real commitment to social responsibility.  It seems that his successors, however, are not as committed.

From Walmart’s perspective, the goals of these opponents is to prevent their local communities from being effected economically by the establishment of Walmart stores in their area. This is due to the profound impacts that Walmart can have on the economic structure of a community.  For this reason, these individuals would have taken up the resistance to a Walmart in their area.  In reaction to this, it would seem Walmart would be best suited to simply finding another area to do business in.

While this does seem like an immoral strategy it is hard to blame these stores for attempting to block the establishment of a Walmart in their area. There are moral concerns about openly accepting this type of behavior, although the massive economic effect of a Walmart is difficult to contend with.  This is, in essence, an unethical practice and it seems unfair to the stakeholders of Walmart for this type of incidence to occur.

Issues such as these demonstrate the coinciding difficulty that a company that reaches the size of Walmart will inevitably contend with.  These problems become more prevalent as the company promotes more businesses. However, the ethical problems should still be considered.  The campaigns to buy American goods and hire American workers does seem on its surface to be progress.  However, critics indicate that Walmart still pays its workers low wages that makes it difficult for them to make a living.

This demonstrates the difficulty in a large company’s reputation.  As they open more stores, they will undoubtedly come across moral and ethical dilemmas that face public scrutiny.  However, it is in how they resolve these problems that their true moral position can be understood.  It is important for them to understand that despite the fact that things will always get worse they must still try to fix the problems.  In doing so, they can help to provide a moral framework for the responsibility that large companies such as theirs have towards society.