Walmartization

Walmart is a retail chain of large discount department stores. “Walmartization” can mean the coming of a Walmart store to a geographical area.
 
“Walmartization,” however, is most often used pejoratively. It often refers to a large retailer or group seeking the lowest prices and the lowest costs; other choices can’t compete and are forced to go out of business.
 
“Wal-Martization” (the store has been named “Wal-Mart” and then “Walmart”) has been cited in print since at least 1988.
 
   
Wikipedia: Walmart
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., branded as Walmart, is an American multinational retail corporation that runs chains of large discount department stores and warehouse stores. The company is the world’s third largest public corporation, according to the Fortune Global 500 list in 2012, the biggest private employer in the world with over two million employees, and is the largest retailer in the world. Walmart remains a family-owned business, as the company is controlled by the Walton family, who own a 48 percent stake in Walmart.[ It is also one of the world’s most valuable companies.
 
The company was founded by Sam Walton in 1962, incorporated on October 31, 1969, and publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange in 1972. It is headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas. Walmart is also the largest grocery retailer in the United States.
 
3 December 1988, Taos (NM) News, pg. A6, col. 1:
“Wal-Martization” takes toll of small service stations
By Billie Blair
(...)
It has become one of more than a dozen of small gasoline stations which have closed in the last five years, bowing out to stiffer environmental regulations and escalating insurance liability costs.
(...)
Local distributors call it “the Wal-Martization” of service stations.
 
Google Books
A Living History of the Ozarks
By Phyllis Rossiter
Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.
1992
Pg. 33:
Ozarkers found it even harder to ignore tourists, paved highways, Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies, World War II, and all the wars since then, the Corps of Engineers, television — especially via satellite — Wal-Martization, videos, newcomers, and commuters.
 
Google Books
9 August 1993, New York magazine, pg. 48, col. 3:
WELCOME TO THE BRAVE new world called the Barnes & Noble superstore — which, depending on your point of view, is either the salvation of literacy and civilization in our time or the scourge of individualism, the latest example of what one critic has called “the Wal-Martization of America.”
 
Google News Archive
11 June 1994, The Dispatch (Lexington, NC), “‘Wal-Martization’ of airline industry under way” by Dan Blake (AP Business Writer), pg. 3B, col. 2:
The trend is part of a broader move toward consistently lower pricing and Spartan service to satisfy air travelers who insist on the cheapest fare.
 
“The full-service airline as we have known it since the dawn of aviation may become a thing of the past,” said Raymond E. Neidl, an industry analyst at the brokerage Furman Selz. “‘Wal-Martization’ of the industry is now under way in earnest.”
 
New York (NY) Times
Where Religion Gets a Big Dose of Shopping-Mall Culture
By GUSTAV NIEBUHR
Published: April 16, 1995
(...)
Still, aspects of the megachurch movement trouble some people. “They are what I call the Wal-Martization of American religion,” Dr. Leonard said, referring to a tendency he sees toward a consumerist approach to religion on their part.
(Bill Leonard, chairman of the religion department at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama—ed.)
 
New York (NY) Times
The Wal-Martization of America
Published: November 15, 2003
The 70,000 grocery workers on strike in Southern California are the front line in a battle to prevent middle-class service jobs from turning into poverty-level ones. The supermarkets say they are forced to lower their labor costs to compete with Wal-Mart, a nonunion, low-wage employer aggressively moving into the grocery business.
(...)
This Wal-Martization of the work force, to which other low-cost, low-pay stores also contribute, threatens to push many Americans into poverty.
 
Rense
The Costs Of
WalMartization Of America
By Silvia Ribeiro
1-17-5
For the first time in history, demarcating the beginning of the 21st century, the biggest company in the world was not an oil concern or an automobile manufacturer, but Wal-Mart, a supermarket chain.
(...)
Though absolutely terrible, labor exploitation is not the only “Wal-Mart” effect. There are many others, including the use of new technologies to track people’s purchases even after leaving the supermarket. Control seems to be the name of the game in the “Walmartization” of the world.
 
Common Dreams
Published on Friday, December 16, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
The Walmartization of America Redux: How the Relentless Drive for Cheap Stuff Undermines Our Economy, Bankrupts Our Soul, and Pillages the Planet
by John Atcheson
If you want to know why the middle class disappeared and where they went, look no further than your local Walmart.  People walked in for the low prices, and walked out with a pile of cheap stuff, but in a figurative sense, they left their wages, jobs, and dignity on the cutting room floor of the House of Cheap.
 
Daily Finance
Can ‘The All American Store’ Reverse Our Nation’s Walmartization?
by Rich Smith   Jan 6th 2012 6:30AM
Updated Jan 9th 2012 8:33AM
Deep in the heart of Ohio, a new store is challenging the “Walmartization” of America.
 
What do I mean by Walmartization? For one thing, I refer to the trend toward superstores, each one alone the size of a shopping mall. It’s also the goods these stores stock—the proverbial $1 dozen-pack of tube socks, and all the other things—from Barbie dolls to HDTVs—adorned with the “Made in China” label. And it’s the service, or rather the lack thereof: Vast expanses of retail space with nary a minimum-wage employee in sight and 24 cash registers at the front, of which two are manned, and 12 are self-checkout.
 
Daily Kos
THU MAR 28, 2013 AT 10:56 AM PDT
The Walmartization of the American food chain is making communities poor and poorly fed
byLaura Clawson
Walmart doesn’t just hurt the people who work in its stores and supply chain. It and a few other companies are consolidating control of the entire American food chain, hurting small farmers and food producers, other grocery stores and their workers, consumers, and local economies.
 
Naked Capitalism
MONDAY, APRIL 1, 2013
More on Devolution and the Walmartization of Our Economy
(...)
The most stunning recent example has proven to be Walmart. The company that McKinsey tagged as the biggest contributor to productivity gains in the 1990s (through both its own efforts and that of copy cats) has become a one-trick pony. It appears that its answer to every competitive challenge is to cut costs further.