Pia Boehm

Wal-Mart. How can the low price industry create sustained consumer value? Pia Boehm

Essay from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,3, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, language: English, abstract: "[...] the work we do to help people live better goes far beyond our store walls. It extends into our communities and around the world and affects the lives of people we will never meet." (Wal-Mart web page, 2014). Wal-Mart is the world's largest public corporation, the biggest private employer with over two million employees and also the largest retailer (Fortune, 2014). However, Wal-Mart is a company which has been confronted with many revealing headlines about its poor social sustainability in recent years; for example, employees in the US are significantly underpaid so that they cannot even afford health insurance (Wedekind, 2009). With regard to these facts, this essay is aiming to analyse the following question: "How can Wal-Mart create customer value in a low price industry in such a way that its customers disregard its lack of social sustainability?"