Walmart

Reasons to avoid

1. A Government Accountability Office report found Walmart ranked among the top four largest U.S. employers of workers receiving food stamps and Medicaid, with an estimated 14,500 Walmart workers on SNAP benefits in the states studied. The report found that millions of full-time workers at some of America's most profitable corporations earned wages so low they qualified for federal assistance.cnbc.com2020-11-19
2. The National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint in January 2024 alleging Walmart interrogated workers about union activity, removed pro-union flyers from a break room, and threatened employees who distributed union literature at a California store. Walmart was simultaneously facing at least 21 other NLRB complaints from workers or unions, and none of its roughly 4,700 U.S. stores have ever unionized despite decades of organizing attempts.reuters.com2024-01-25
3. When Walmart closed four stores in Chicago's predominantly Black and low-income South and West Side neighborhoods in April 2023, a University of Illinois Chicago study found that businesses near a Walmart were significantly more likely to close, and that jobs lost at competing retailers essentially offset those created at the new Walmart stores. The closures left thousands of residents without nearby access to groceries or pharmacies.cnn.com2023-04-15
4. Walmart agreed to pay $3.1 billion in November 2022 to settle lawsuits from all 50 states alleging its pharmacies filled opioid prescriptions at volumes and patterns that helped fuel the addiction crisis. The settlement was one of the largest ever reached against a pharmacy chain over the opioid epidemic.npr.org2022-11-15
5. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Walmart in February 2022 for gender and race discrimination after finding the company gave a Black female employee an unsanitary lactation space based on her race and denied her a promotion based on gender stereotypes about mothers with young children. The EEOC found the conduct violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.eeoc.gov2022-02-11
6. Greenpeace sued Walmart in 2020 for falsely labeling plastic packaging as recyclable, after investigations found that the vast majority of plastic collected at Walmart's in-store drop-off bins was sent to landfills or incinerated rather than recycled. Walmart called its labeling lawful but did not dispute that most of the collected plastic is not actually recycled.cbsnews.com2020-12-23
7. The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health named Walmart the only major retailer on its 2024 "Dirty Dozen" list of dangerous employers, citing an employee death that went unreported to OSHA, over 1,100 gun-related incidents at Walmart stores since 2014, and the company allocating less than 1% of its $7 million lobbying budget to worker health and safety.sourcingjournal.com2024-04-25
8. An investigation by Americans for Tax Fairness found that Walmart had built a network of 22 shell companies in Luxembourg with $64 billion in assets, despite operating no stores in the country, and had 78 total subsidiaries across 15 offshore tax havens that were never disclosed in its SEC filings. The structure allowed Walmart to generate an estimated $1.5 billion in annual U.S. tax deductions through transactions with its own overseas subsidiaries.cbsnews.com2015-06-17