高考英语《流行话题 语境识词 4500》Unit 100 The Wal-Mart You Don't Know 素材Unit 100 The Wal-Mart You Don't Know Wal-Mart is not just the world's largest retailer. It's world's largest company -- bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale is hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sells in three months what number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don't change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and none of its 21,000 suppliers know is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close US plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas. Indeed, the real story of Wal-Mart, the story that never gets told, is the story of the pressure the biggest retailer relentlessly applies to its suppliers in the name of bringing us "every day low prices". It's the story of what that pressure does to the companies Wal-Mart does business with, to US manufacturing, and to the economy as a whole. The giant retailer's low prices often come with a high cost. Wal-Mart's relentless pressure can crush the companies it does business with and force them to send jobs overseas. Are w e shopping our way straight to the unemployment line? Of course, US companies have been moving ...
