Walmart Business Ethics: A Utilitarianism Analysis
This paper analyzes Walmart's business practices through the lens of utilitarianism, drawing on the case study "One Nation under Walmart." It examines the company's history, global scale, and positive contributions—including low consumer prices, food donations, and environmental sustainability efforts—alongside persistent criticisms regarding low wages, anti-union policies, gender discrimination, supply chain abuses, and adverse effects on local businesses. Applying utilitarian principles, the paper argues that Walmart's enormous economic power means virtually every action it takes produces both beneficial and harmful consequences simultaneously, making a straightforward moral judgment impossible. The analysis concludes that even well-intentioned corporate initiatives can harm certain groups, underscoring the complexity of evaluating a company of Walmart's scale under a utilitarian framework.
- Introduction: Frames Walmart's success and ethical controversies
- Walmart's History and Global Reach: Founding, growth, and global store footprint
- Positive Contributions and Corporate Citizenship: Low prices, food donations, environmental initiatives
- Criticisms of Walmart's Business Practices: Wages, unions, discrimination, and supply chain abuses
- Utilitarianism Applied to Walmart: Weighing net benefits and harms of Walmart's actions
- Conclusion: Synthesis of utilitarian judgment on Walmart
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper applies a clearly named ethical framework—utilitarianism—consistently throughout the analysis, anchoring each claim about Walmart to the central question of whether outcomes are net beneficial or harmful.
- It balances praise and criticism of Walmart in roughly equal measure, demonstrating that the author is engaging with evidence rather than simply advocating a position.
- Multiple specific examples (Hurricane Katrina relief, the organic food market, the Walmart v. Dukes Supreme Court ruling) ground abstract ethical arguments in concrete, verifiable events.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates multi-perspective analysis: rather than accepting either the pro-Walmart or anti-Walmart narrative, it systematically shows how the same corporate action can be simultaneously praised by one group and condemned by another. This technique is particularly appropriate for utilitarian analysis, which requires accounting for all affected parties before rendering a moral judgment.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a brief introduction that frames the research question and announces the utilitarian methodology. A substantial review-and-analysis section covers Walmart's historical development, its global footprint, its positive community contributions, and then its most serious criticisms in sequence. The ethical framework is then applied directly to these findings, using real-world examples such as the organic food controversy and the 2013 worker walkouts. The conclusion synthesizes the findings and gestures toward a broader historical judgment, invoking John Stuart Mill by name.
Introduction
"Walmart is one of the world's largest, most successful, and most vilified corporations." — Art Carden, 2010
Today, Walmart is the largest company in the world, with more than 11,500 retail units in 28 countries, annual sales exceeding $288 billion, and 2.2 million employees called "associates" (Walmart corporate and financial facts, 2015). In addition, Walmart is one of the largest private employers in both the United States and Canada (Walmart corporate and financial facts, 2015). What makes Walmart particularly noteworthy is that it achieved its current level of success in retailing, and no other retailers have come close to being as influential or large (Shaw). Notwithstanding its economic success, Walmart has also been the source of significant criticism because of the low wages it pays as well as its adverse impact on small businesses in the cities and towns in which it competes. To determine the facts about Walmart, this paper provides an analysis of the case study "One Nation under Walmart" from a utilitarianism perspective, followed by a summary of the research and important findings in the conclusion.
Walmart's History and Global Reach
Founded in 1962 by Sam Walton, Walmart's first store was located in Rogers, Arkansas. In 1969, the company incorporated under the commercial name "Wal-Mart," and in 1972 it became publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (Walmart corporate and financial facts, 2015). Today, the company operates retail stores under the name "Walmart" as well as Sam's Clubs, Neighborhood Markets, and Supercenters, while also maintaining a prominent web presence through Walmart.com (Walmart corporate and financial facts, 2015). At present, Walmart operates approximately 971 discount stores, 2,447 supercenters, 132 neighborhood markets, and 591 Sam's Clubs in the United States (Corona, 2014).
In addition, Walmart has 21 retail stores in Argentina, 313 in Brazil, 305 in Canada, 149 in Costa Rica, 70 in El Salvador, 145 in Guatemala, 47 in Honduras, 394 in Japan, 1,023 in Mexico, 46 in Nicaragua, 54 in Puerto Rico, and 352 in the UK, together with more than 202 stores in China managed as joint ventures (Corona, 2014). Moreover, Walmart is the only company in the top four of the Fortune 500 that is not an energy company (Carden, 2010).
Positive Contributions and Corporate Citizenship
To its credit, Walmart has been cited for a number of positive contributions to the communities in which it competes. Shaw notes that "the good news for consumers is that Walmart has risen to retail supremacy through the bargain prices it offers" (p. 180). Likewise, the company was among the first to offer $4 generic prescriptions, which has benefitted tens of millions of senior citizens and low-income consumers (Massengill, 2013). In addition, Walmart donates millions of pounds of food each year to those in need. Creel (2011) reports that "Walmart donated more than 127 million pounds of food to Feeding America in 2009" (p. 23). Moreover, the company achieved a 60% increase in fuel efficiency in its vehicle fleet between 2005 and 2011 (Creel, 2011), and has taken aggressive steps to improve its overall environmental sustainability in recent years (Orlando, 2012).
Besides the foregoing, the company has also partnered with initiatives to provide healthier, low-cost food alternatives in its retail stores (Shaw). In this regard, Hauter (2014) reports that "not only is Walmart promising to sell more organic products than ever before, but the company says it will sell them cheaply" (p. 19). Even the company's critics praised Walmart's efforts to provide humanitarian relief following Hurricane Katrina and its environmental sustainability initiatives. As Shaw advises:
Walmart has begun to respond to the criticism that it is a poor corporate citizen by improving employee health insurance coverage and adopting greener business practices. And even its usual critics applauded when the company responded rapidly to Hurricane Katrina, sending truckloads of water and food, much of it reaching residents before federal supplies did. (p. 180)
Criticisms of Walmart's Business Practices
Taken together, it is clear that Walmart has become an enormously powerful entity that can produce significant social good by providing consumers with low-cost products and services, but this clout can also cause significant harm. According to Shaw, despite Walmart's impressive economic success, the company has also been criticized for a number of reasons, including the following:
Indeed, even in the rare instances where the company has faced pressure to allow unions, Walmart has actually closed stores rather than permit unions to affect its human resource practices (Moberg, 2013). Beyond this, Walmart has been criticized for allowing some of its supply chain partners in developing countries to use child labor (Isern, 2009). In addition, the company was the target of a 2011 class action lawsuit filed by more than one million employees across 3,400 different stores, alleging sexual harassment, discrimination, and failure to promote, among other causes (Reed & Harding, 2015). Although the plaintiffs provided substantial statistical evidence confirming that Walmart had corporate policies in place that disadvantaged female employees, the Supreme Court unanimously held in Walmart v. Dukes (131 S. Ct. 2541, 2011) that the plaintiffs had failed to present a complaint common to all members of the class, and the case was dismissed (Reed & Harding, 2015).
While Walmart succeeded in that case, it has not always been so fortunate. In 2013, tens of thousands of supporters responded to calls from the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) to support the 500 Walmart workers who staged a day-long walkout at approximately 1,000 stores (Moberg, 2013). According to Moberg, the Walmart employees were "fed up with what they saw as Walmart's inadequate pay, disrespectful working conditions and illegal punishment of workers who speak out" (2013, p. 31).
Conclusion
The research showed that there is plenty to love and plenty to hate about Walmart, and the extent to which the company's business practices are viewed in one way or the other depends on the perspective applied. A utilitarian analysis of Walmart's business practices clearly showed that even when the company attempts to do something good, its enormity means that some individuals or groups will be harmed in the process. Certainly, the company has deserved some of the criticism leveled against it, particularly with respect to wages and working conditions, but the flip side of that argument is that 2.2 million people have a job, and that working conditions at Walmart are no better or worse than at countless other commercial enterprises—and are likely far better than working conditions in many developing nations.
In the final analysis, it is reasonable to conclude that John Stuart Mill would have encountered significant difficulties analyzing the morality of Walmart's business practices because of the company's unprecedented size and economic clout. Love it or hate it—or both—the research also made clear that Walmart is a force to be reckoned with, and it is reasonable to conclude that consumers in the twenty-second century will be shopping at even more Walmart locations in virtually every country of the world.
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