

The Bribery Aisle: How Wal-Mart Used Payoffs To Get Its Way in Mexico - wallflower
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/business/walmart-bribes-teotihuacan.html?hp&_r=0

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raheemm
_In interviews, council members said they viewed Wal-Mart’s proposal through
the prism of lingering resentments toward their public markets. Residents had
long complained about vendors inflating prices and rigging scales. They liked
the way Wal-Mart challenged the old irritants of the Mexican shopping
experience — stores that do not list prices; stores with no parking; stores
with musty display cases._

I can relate to the above here in Bangladesh. The local grocery chains as well
as the mom and pop stores are notorious for price discrepancies but worse than
that - they sell food that has been adulterated and even laced with chemicals.
With Wal-Mart consumers would at least get better quality food relative to
those sold by local businesses.

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shiven
You nailed it. I clearly do not understand the American (edit: and now
spreading wider) obsession with glorifying everything Mom-&-Pop or conflating
small-business with 'good' and big-business with 'evil' all the time!

Walmart is probably going to be the best thing to make the entrenched old
players clean up their act and force them to find a USP that keeps them
relevant. Such change, shake-ups and rattles, are good for the consumers - who
have clearly been ripped-off by the Mom-&-Pop bandits for long years.

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Groxx
A tl;dr from a skim through: after WalMart of Mexico paid millions in bribes
and had a whistleblower which prompted and an internal investigation that
found supporting evidence, WalMart stopped the investigation and did damage
control rather than damage prevention. And it continues. This story in
particular deals with the WalMart near a Teotihuacán pyramid, which only cost
them about $80k in bribes.

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grannyg00se
Not just bribery, which from what I understand is a common way of business in
many areas. This is more like out and out fraud, public deception, and gross
ethics violations. Horrible stuff. Maybe that's just how high level bribery
works. Much worse than the type of bribery I've heard of in the past.

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reubensutton
This was a fascinating article, astonishing that companies can get away with
this level of corruption still. I struggle to believe that Walmart don't do
this in other markets, especially other developing economies.

People who are fans of this style of journalism should check out
<http://longform.org> for an archive of it. I'm not connected to it, just a
fan.

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unreal37
I shop at Walmart (or I should say, used to). This is a compelling story, and
I feel so sad for the people of this town that lost some of its culture to
Walmart. Why is Walmart refusing to comment?

Walmart should close that store, level the place and return it as something
beautiful to the community. They cannot be allowed to profit off of this grave
crime.

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KumarAseem
The same is about to happen in my country, India. Over here also corruption is
rampant and the laws are lax. I have stopped shopping from Super markets
unless the item is not available anywhere else. I guess that is the only
solution the public has at its hand and can be easily implemented.

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bsj
"I don't know which is worse... that everyone has his price, or that the price
is always so low." - Hobbes (from Calvin and Hobbes)

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uvdiv
There's a perverse irony in staging hunger strikes to protest cheap food.

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EliRivers
Ah yes, if we pretend their complaints are about cheap food, we can make them
look foolish and in doing so reduce the legitimacy of their argument. Good
idea.

