Thursday, March 22, 2007

critique on "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price"

In "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price", the director Robert Greenwald indicated about an overview of the Wal-Mart's controveries in the United states which are including competeting and ruining local business, employee's benefits, a working condition and employee's uninon. By a persuasion with so many employee's interviews of Wal_Mart, the documentary included much emotional , and the director gave his or her bias on this documentary.

According to the documentary, many interviews showed the real emotions such as depressed, frustrated, disappointed, ruined, unfair. The director used so many emotions that his persuasion might be successful. For example, one of those was the sadness and ruin of the local hardware business seemed to close because of the explosion of Wal-Mart in U.S. More over, the bias of this documentary illustrated the right for employee needing improvement in Wal-Mart. Even though the documentary introduced both interviews of employees and CEO of the Wal-Mart, the bias has showed literally. For the reason, the short scene of CEO speech was took from a part of the meeting or documetary. This bias might be weak because there was no evidence or direct interview from CEO or the other managers of Wal-Mart. On the one hand, most of interviews showed the annoyance about the wal-mart
from local bussiness and employees. Comparing with Wal-mart in the other countries, my friend told that the Wal-Mart in Korea was bankruptcy, so the Korea bought all branches and turned into the Korean national brand. Futher more, Wal-mart were very successful in China from my Chinese friend's opinion. From this documentary, China and the United States had the same problem about the wal-mart's controversies. It seems to appear that employee still work for Wal-Mart without benefit because the incomes for family. The Wal-mart has been successful not only because the price is cheaper but also the branches are opened in the high unemployment rates. The documentary stressed about the union of the Wal-mart employee, yet a half of them went for unionizing. The failure of the Wal-mart working condition is very unexpectedly. My reflection about Wal-Mart was not so bad. After watching the documentary, I have found that all successful brands have their own selfishness and greed.

In conlusion, the documentary appears biased, its arguments based on too little evidence to persuade, and the language and the interview is very emotional. This documentary has successful illustration on the employee and local people about the Wal-Mart's controversies about the working condition and local business. However, it failed on the contrast of CEO and rare authentic statistic sources.

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