Is Wal-Mart Good For America? (dvd)

by PBS Frontline

HEL*MART™ is the brainchild of Tarraccas Obremski, a 32 year old college student and entrepreneur living in Washington State. It's operated with the help of friend and collegue, Chanelle StPierre. We design and produce the products that we sell ourselves with the help of locally owned businesses and U.S. suppliers. It is our belief that investing in one's community ultimately helps everyone in that community, including the individual, to achieve a higher standard of living and enjoy improved quality of life.

While Sam Walton's original idea may have been to provide products in rural communities at the lower prices that their urban counterparts enjoyed, WAL-MART became and is now a predatory, be-all-things-to-all-people multi-national corporation that does not compete with but rather is in the business of intentially targeting and annihilating small, privately owned businesses, replacing a fraction of the lost jobs with lower-paying ones, subsidizing their employees' healthcare via state programs supported by our tax dollars, and funneling billions upon billions of dollars out of our local economies back to their bank in Bentonville, Arkansas. We believe it's extremely unethical for a multi-billion dollar corporation to profit hand over fist while compensating it's employees little more than minimum wage and denying them decent health benefits all under the guise of “giving the customer what he wants.” And we believe that it's extremely unethical of WAL-MART to use undisclosed overseas sweatshop factories to produce merchandise that meets the incredible pressure of it's bottom line. We contend that WAL-MART does not care about people; not it's suppliers, it's employees, or it's customers and that ultimately it is all of us who pay the high cost of WAL-MART's lower prices.

Respectfully,

Tarraccas Obremski
Creator/Owner