Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices

Wal-Mart has become one of America's most successful retail chains by offering everyday goods at low prices for working families. But just how is Wal-Mart able to charge less than many of their rivals, and what has their success done for their employees? Documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald takes a look inside the discount retailer's empire in Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, and discovers a company short on scruples and long on shabby treatment of the people who work for them. Through interviews with labor experts and former Wal-Mart employees, Greenwald documents the firm's anti-union tactics, their history of paying wages often below the poverty line, the high price they charge for health benefits (employees are often encouraged to apply for government subsidized health care programs instead), their methods for driving away locally owned businesses, their practice of hiring illegal aliens for cleanup crews at a fraction of minimum wage, the abysmal working conditions and pay in the Third World plants where much of Wal-Mart's goods are manufactured, and more. Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price was one in a series of activist documentaries from director Greenwald which includes the films Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, Uncovered: The War in Iraq, and Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties. — Mark Deming

Robert Greenwald continues his string of activist documentaries with Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, a rallying cry against what many consider to be the epitome of sleazy big business that targets and even has a hand in creating America's lowest economic class. While obviously biased, the film is infused with enough firsthand human drama and shocking statistics that it's hard to think that it can't have an impact. Sadly, the culture it's unleashed upon either already holds its own opinions on the matter or the people that really should see it probably won't. And though striking in its nature, the documentary has come under some valid criticisms that it doesn't shine a light on the consumers who continue to shop there. While that concern could be made into its own film, it just might be the one topic that Greenwald doesn't touch, and because of that, it's almost as if he's glossing over that fact or turning a blind eye to it. Still, this is an important piece of work that will no doubt reach an audience thanks to the ingenious grassroots marketing campaign with which Greenwald has aligned himself. — Jeremy Wheeler