Walmart is the world’s largest retailer, with thousands of stores across the U.S. and operations that stretch into global supply chains. Built on extreme scale and bulk purchasing power, it has reshaped how people shop and how goods are sourced worldwide. That influence drives down wages, guts local businesses, and fuels environmental destruction.
Walmart’s legacy of ultra-low prices may look good at checkout, but recent data reveal a darker reality: communities with a new Walmart Supercenter experience average household incomes falling by 6% over a decade, about $5,000 less per household, and poverty rising by 8%, despite consumer price savings.
Walmart’s dominant pricing and supplier leverage create a monopsony effect, suppressing wages and undermining local businesses and industries, further destabilizing regional economies.
Coupled with documented union-busting, exploitative supplier demands, high-deforestation agricultural sourcing, and aggressive tax and lobbying strategies, Walmart’s structural harm extends well beyond its stores. Its model extracts wealth from communities, compounding economic precarity even as it sells “low prices."