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Aayush Koirala

Professor Sam

Writing 001

31 October 2018

The truth of a massive company, Walmart. Unsympathetic; destroying small business,

underpaying their employee, and many more.

In the documentary, “Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price” released on November 4,

2005, it attempts to put down the company Walmart as job taking company to the community

around the city. The primary purpose of this documentary is to show the role of the American

economy as its evolving such as the company Walmart which underpays its employees, kills

small business, and mistreats their employees. This documentary focuses on various strategies to

prove how atrocious the company is by using rhetorical strategies such as a specific structure,

pathos, ethos, and logos.

As for the role of the American economy, the documentary provides facts about ongoing

changes in American economics to persuade the audience that the American market is changing

dramatically. For example, it provides how the company Walmart changed the whole economic

system of the town whereas there is no job left for small businesses. Due to this factor, the

documentary states that there are always changes that can help one's economic but can hurt

others economy also. Even with the belief, the documentary still takes a stance on how Walmart

is dreadful when it comes to being one of the massive company.

The producer uses a specific structure to present a distinct type of businesses and help

coordinate the documentary through its main points precisely. The order of the documentary

gives us the claims made by the producer, followed by emotional interviews, and then presents
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the audience various logos to back up the claims while adding credibility to the audience. It all

happens through a smooth transition making it easier for the audience to focus on the subjects

being presented in the documentary.

The argument that is conveyed throughout the documentary is persuasive because the

viewer gets emotionally attached right away on the fact that nobody wants their family business

to close after all the years and work for a big company. To persuade the audience, the emotional

factor that mainly goes into is music where it makes the viewers feel sad about Walmart taking

the job. Most of the music in the documentary creates a tragic and gloomy effect to make the

audience feel sorrow for people. For example, sad music is played through to depicts a negative

tone towards Walmart when a woman named Grace Thibodeaux is speaking about how excited

she was that Walmart is coming in her town, but she found out later that it was killing the local

businesses in downtown. Throughout the documentary, it also provides images for matching the

mood of the audience to be set into in each scene such as sadness or surprise. Proving emotional

type of images helps the viewer become more engaged in the argument and develop an opinion

about the topic. For example, the image below shows how downtown is empty because Walmart

has stolen business and customer from other people.

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The documentary presents opinion to set the emotion for the audience about working in

Walmart and how employees are paid lower wages. It also states the unsafety of company

parking lot that people experience such as robbing and mainly the harsh condition worker face in

China building cheap products for Walmart because they are the leading manufacturer of the

Walmart. In contrast, the primary value of Chinese people working and producing which only

cost about $.50 and selling it for almost 20 times of the money shows the profit they gain by

giving people much work in China. Overall, the documentary mentions how in China people

work hard every day, but they are also living in harsh conditions creating the image that Walmart

does not care where they get their products from and the environment but instead only care for

the money.

There were also a variety of scenes in the documentary that was introduced with ethos

about the damage that Walmart caused to local business and their employee. Ethos is developed

in this documentary using Walmart employees that have been working for over ten years and are

very familiar with how the company operates. These people are therefore known as credible

sources and are trusted. The documentary emphasizes interviews of employees and managers

who have worked in different positions within the Walmart corporation as well as previous

community retail store owners and employees from other companies. They say that Walmart has

closed their business and robbed them. By interviewing, the employees and managers share their

personal stories about their experiences of being mistreated and the cause of company closing

their businesses down. It creates a feeling of awareness about what is happening around the

community.

For example, a woman who works for the Catawba River Company talks about how there

were cases of fertilizers in the Walmart parking lot and when it rained, some of the fertilizers
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leaked from the cases, and into the river. The woman being interviewed in this scene goes on to

explain how the fertilizers that ended up in the river is the primary drinking supply for the

community and how it contaminated it. The woman presents an example of the harm the

fertilizer could do to people. She says, "There is a mom somewhere, who is at a kitchen sink, and

she is putting water in a bottle to make formula for a baby and that water from the river is what

the baby is drinking.” The producer uses this clip particularly because the mention of babies

makes the audience relate mainly fragility and care of innocent babies. It also gives a sense of

how corrupt and careless Walmart is about harming the innocent creature in human nature. The

documentary also reveals a woman that was talking about the difficulties she had with Walmart

when trying to reach them to fix the problem of water pollution. It shows a clip of the woman

trying to call the authorities of Walmart, but she was getting no answers and had to leave voice

messages. This clip was presented in the documentary to indicate how unresponsive and

unreliable Walmart was during this life-threatening incident. This contrasts with one of the most

common views of Walmart as advertised as being dependable, and “always having your back”

when it comes to their customers. The rhetorical techniques used in this scene is not the only

credibility but also targets at the audience to create an emotional response, and to show people

the true nature of Walmart.

Logos is developed by showing the audience many statistics about Walmart. For

example, the fact that Walmart drives down retail wages 3 billion per year affects how we see

this massive business. By showing these negative statistics, we can compare our findings to other

companies that we know such as K-Mart. It makes the audience to distrust Walmart even more.

Therefore, it accomplishes the producer purpose. Another example of logos that is shown in the

documentary is how Walmart is being subsidized in a different city with insanely amount of
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money. For example, Walmart subsidy in Brookfield: $300,000.00. Subsidy in Cameron: $2.1

million, and most importantly subsidy national wide: $1.008 billion while Esry's family that

owns a local shop had a subsidy of $0 from the government. Through presenting these this

subsidy to the audience, it proves to the audience that how far Walmart has come into their

business that even the government is focusing on the big company and that they do not care

about small business. One last example of logos presented in the documentary is about how 80%

of crime that happened in the Walmart was in their parking lot. Through using this, it

demonstrates how careless the company is when it comes to protecting their customer. All they

want the customer to do is spend money inside, and that is it. They do not care what happens

outside. The reason behind is to make the audience feel anger and make them think about how

pity the company is based on the basis that all they want is money from their customers.

Since this documentary was released in 2005, it was released in compact disk also. The

cover of this documentary compact disk presented above shows an extraordinary image of a man

that is portrayed as Walmart who is going through the neighborhood in a rampage mode stealing

everybody's money from all side. It presents a perception that there is no obstacle for Walmart
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that they are required to face. It creates a message to the audience that the documentary is going

to be about how destructive Walmart is and how it mainly cares about money.

Overall, this documentary manages to capture the interpretation of an average Walmart

shopper and show them the truth about the company they are supporting daily. The value that

this company holds is on the millions of people that have depended on their entire lives shopping

cheap. However, it has an entirely different side to it. The documentary produces a strong and

compelling argument that Walmart not only underpays its employees, kills small business,

mistreats their employee, but also, it's not eco-friendly and does not care about their customers. It

all states through the uses of rhetorical strategies such as a specific structure, pathos, ethos, and

logos.
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Citation

Greenwald, Robert, Jim Gilliam, Devin Smith, Cathryn C. Borum, Kerry Candaele, Luisa

Dantas, Sarah Feeley, Lisa Smithline, Chris Gordon, Douglas Cheek, Jonathan Brock,

Kristy Tully, and John Frizzell. Wal*mart: The High Cost of Low Price. New York:

Retail Project L.L.C, 2005.