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Comment by lquist | Hacker News Reader

This won't apply to everyone, but before applying to Walmart/Walmart Labs, do remember that Walmart will ask you to pass a drug test.

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You may not know, but does the Dept. of Justice announcing they won't challenge state medical marijuana laws have any effect on pre-employment drug testing? Why or why not? Most employers seem to be moving away from it, in my experience.

Independent of state (medical or otherwise) marijuana laws, employers still drug test (even in WA, where personal pot use is legal, for example). Pot users aren't a protected class for discrimination purposes, afaik. I agree that it seems silly.

Things are a bit different in the software world, where employers are moving away from drug testing because they need all the talent they can get. It turns out some potheads are actually pretty productive members of society if you give them a chance.

I read somewhere that among Silicon Valley engineers, the usage rate is like 40% or so. If that is true, then when almost 1 in 2 engineers smokes, you can't afford to discriminate.

Yep. Among the US population as a whole, lifetime illicit drug use is something like 50%. So I wouldn't be too surprised if it was that high among SV engineers.

Most tech employers never had it to begin with. I don't understand how it's legal, honestly.

I dont understand why private businesses discriminating even matters. They just put themselves at a disadvantage by limiting their applicant pool based on whatever tests/discrimination they want.

Also remember that they are evil.

I don't toss this around lightly, but Wal-Mart is one of the very few companies (I actually can't think of any others right now) that I absolutely will not do business with no matter what.

I don't toss this around lightly, but Wal-Mart is one of the very few companies I absolutely always do business with because it is cheap, reliable, and I hate going to multiple stores on a single shopping trip.

This is a good example of why libertarians are evil.

try costco

Costco targets the high-middle-class families, who have the income and space to buy bulk. And by making up in volume and high-end products [1] Costco can afford to "not be evil".

[1] - One not very well-known facts about Costco is that a big part of their profit comes from the high-end "novelty" stuff that they put in between the cheap bulk items. That works for them because people who shop at Costco have high disposable income.

Facebook is to privacy as Wal-Mart is to small retail business.

Has it actually been proven that Wal-Mart is detrimental to small retail business?

I know, it seems obvious on the face of it. Wal-Mart comes to Mayberry, and Walker's Drug Store and Foley's Grocery and Weaver's Department Store can't compete and go out of business.

...except weren't those already nailed before Wal-Mart got there by Walgreen's and Safeway and JC Penny?

I suspect that when a place is big enough to support a Wal-Mart, it's already attracted enough big national chains that the small guys are dead or dying.

Wal-Mart is able to survive and thrive in environments where other chains can't. They can be the first, not the last, big national retail chain to move in.

The town where I went to high school got one. Before they showed up, there were no other big chains of anything in that sort of business. The closest were some of the standard big chain fast food joints and gas stations. Walgreens, Safeway, JC Penney, none of them existed there.

I left before the Wal-Mart came so I didn't really see how things changed with it. I have no idea if it was good or bad for small businesses (of which there wasn't much to destroy anyway) or the town as a whole. I'm just addressing the idea that Wal-Mart would somehow be a latecomer.

s/small business/small retail/

quite

Could you elaborate why?

They severely mistreat their employees when it comes to on-the-job injuries.

Friend of mine injured his knee while working in one of their warehouses. A perverse company policy gives bonuses if the crew is injury-free for a certain amount of time. This is supposed to improve safety, but what it does is cause management to put intense pressure on workers not to see a doctor when injured, because if they don't see a doctor then it doesn't count.

In my friend's case, this exacerbated the injury greatly. By the time he got medical attention, it was a $20,000 surgery. Wal-Mart then denied responsibility, saying it was an old football injury and thus a preexisting condition not covered by their health policy. This basically bankrupted him.

Beyond that, they achieve low prices by leveraging their massive size difference to completely screw producers. Examples:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MF1qnjm...

http://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart

In short, Wal-Mart will make big promises that generate big commitments from suppliers, then break their contracts in ways that are difficult to fight in order to save money and make the suppliers ever more dependent on them.

But, to be honest, the way they personally affected me by fucking over my friend is by far the bigger reason behind my judgment.

I'm not generally troubled by the way that companies act as amoral profit-maximizers. But they're supposed to do it within the law. Wal-Mart actively screws over people by playing outside the rules, far beyond what I see other companies doing.

That would be the same of accusing Apple of being evil for overlooking environmental laws, while other companies (Samsung, etc...) use the exact same practices and end up getting a free pass. Walmart gets labeled as "evil" simply because they are the big ones and therefore the media likes to make them the example, but every retailer acts like them.

This is a problem of corporate-capitalism and the lack of labor protection in the US more than anything else.

(I agree with you that this is bad behavior. My point is simply that this kind of behavior should be enforced by the system)

Are the others, in fact, just as bad? If so, I've not heard of it. Sure, there are certain routine abuses that are rampant everywhere, but Wal-Mart takes it to a uniquely high level from what I know. I could be wrong, of course, but that's what I know.

> Are the others, in fact, just as bad?

Well, just one example that came to my mind from a documentary I watched recently:

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/viewfinder/asia/2013/07/...

It's nearly impossible to link a single case of cancer to a particular cause, since the whole process is deeply probabilistic. Absent evidence of routine abuses at this factory and a significant increase in cancer incidence among workers, it doesn't really work.

A knee injury, on the other hand, is trivial to link to the on-the-job accident that caused it in many cases.

Thanks for that.

When this kind of comment comes up, I am always concerned about a slippery-slope as there are many other companies / practices that do worse things than Walmart and thus boycotting only Walmart would be a hypocrisy. You could say similar things about Apple products, or the random T shirt one would pick up from a cheap store. The personal angle in your comment makes a lot of sense.

There is also their aggressive anti-union tactics. They have a anti-union response team that flies in on a corporate jet to deal with any stores that are threatening to organize.

But I bet you'd shop Amazon without thinking twice.

Yep!

Care to tell me why I shouldn't?

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