The Bribery Aisle: How Wal-Mart Used Payoffs To Get Its Way in Mexico | Hacker News Reader

The Bribery Aisle: How Wal-Mart Used Payoffs To Get Its Way in Mexico

nytimes.com

37 pointswallflower11 comments

In interviews, council members said they viewed Wal-Mart’s proposal through the prism of lingering resentments toward their public markets. Residents had long complained about vendors inflating prices and rigging scales. They liked the way Wal-Mart challenged the old irritants of the Mexican shopping experience — stores that do not list prices; stores with no parking; stores with musty display cases.

I can relate to the above here in Bangladesh. The local grocery chains as well as the mom and pop stores are notorious for price discrepancies but worse than that - they sell food that has been adulterated and even laced with chemicals. With Wal-Mart consumers would at least get better quality food relative to those sold by local businesses.

You nailed it. I clearly do not understand the American (edit: and now spreading wider) obsession with glorifying everything Mom-&-Pop or conflating small-business with 'good' and big-business with 'evil' all the time!

Walmart is probably going to be the best thing to make the entrenched old players clean up their act and force them to find a USP that keeps them relevant. Such change, shake-ups and rattles, are good for the consumers - who have clearly been ripped-off by the Mom-&-Pop bandits for long years.

A tl;dr from a skim through: after WalMart of Mexico paid millions in bribes and had a whistleblower which prompted and an internal investigation that found supporting evidence, WalMart stopped the investigation and did damage control rather than damage prevention. And it continues. This story in particular deals with the WalMart near a Teotihuacán pyramid, which only cost them about $80k in bribes.

Not just bribery, which from what I understand is a common way of business in many areas. This is more like out and out fraud, public deception, and gross ethics violations. Horrible stuff. Maybe that's just how high level bribery works. Much worse than the type of bribery I've heard of in the past.

+ the $114K to the mayor

This was a fascinating article, astonishing that companies can get away with this level of corruption still. I struggle to believe that Walmart don't do this in other markets, especially other developing economies.

People who are fans of this style of journalism should check out http://longform.org for an archive of it. I'm not connected to it, just a fan.

I shop at Walmart (or I should say, used to). This is a compelling story, and I feel so sad for the people of this town that lost some of its culture to Walmart. Why is Walmart refusing to comment?

Walmart should close that store, level the place and return it as something beautiful to the community. They cannot be allowed to profit off of this grave crime.

The same is about to happen in my country, India. Over here also corruption is rampant and the laws are lax. I have stopped shopping from Super markets unless the item is not available anywhere else. I guess that is the only solution the public has at its hand and can be easily implemented.

"I don't know which is worse... that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low." - Hobbes (from Calvin and Hobbes)

There's a perverse irony in staging hunger strikes to protest cheap food.

Ah yes, if we pretend their complaints are about cheap food, we can make them look foolish and in doing so reduce the legitimacy of their argument. Good idea.

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