Well I’ve finally finished reading The Wal-Mart Effect. This book first came out in 2005, so I’m a bit behind and the information is a bit out of date. However, I do recommend reading this book, especially if you’re a Wal-Mart shopper.

Now I don’t want to say never shop at Wal-Mart. I’ve shopped at Wal-Mart and there was a time in my life where if I needed a cheese grater, or towels, I could only really afford to shop at Wal-Mart (ok, maybe I’m still in this stage but I’ve made due without Wal-Mart for a couple years now).  But I will say THINK about it when you shop at Wal-Mart.

Just to say something good about Wal-Mart…do you remember when deodorant came in boxes? It doesn’t any more. Wal-Mart made that happen, saving countless trees from being harvested to make deodorant boxes. Why did Wal-Mart do this? Each box cost 5 cents. They asked their suppliers to take out the box so Wal-Mart pays 5 cents less for each one bought, plus less weight to ship saving shipping costs. That’s a lot of saving when you think about how many people have deodorant that they buy 3 or 4 times a year. So they didn’t do it for the environment, but it worked out well anyway.

But what else happens when you want to squeeze 2 or 3 cents less per item from your suppliers? Well maybe the supplier has to use a cheaper material. Maybe they skip employee raises this year.  Maybe, if you ask them over and over to find a way to take 2 or 3 cents off per item (which Wal-Mart does, often, and with a non-negotiable attitude), the supplier has to move it’s factory to China or Mexico.

The Wal-Mart Effect has a story of a company or two that went through each one of those steps. It has stories of real people, like the women from Bangladesh talking about factory conditions where if you made a mistake sewing a pair of pants the supervisors beat you with the pants. How does that make you feel about buying those pants for $20 at Wal-Mart? Not so great a deal anymore, is it?

Wal-Mart does do factory inspections overseas. They do a lot of them. But they also have a lot of factories that supply them and when you push and push to get cheaper products, things happen at those factories that Wal-Mart just can’t catch.

I don’t want to make this a super long post, so I can’t even really scratch the surface of the information in the book. There is also a very interesting afterward that talks of the initiatives Wal-Mart is taking to improve their image, such as cutting greenhouse emissions from all stores by 20% by 2012. Pretty impressive. But will they actually do it? I hope so. As much as we love to hate Wal-Mart, it is a global force that won’t be going away anytime soon and it affects many aspects of our everyday lives whether you shop there or not.

Monkeys!

A great benefit of living in Australia is you can get cheap flights to South East Asia. Hooray! So that is why Brad and I took fours days and flew to Kuala Lumpur (KL).

It was an amazing few days. The first day was spent checking out the city. The largest chunk of time was in Chinatown…eating, drinking and bartering. Petaling Street is a bustling street bazaar where I felt I needed a shirt that read “No I don’t want any DVDs”. We found that, in general, the people were much more relaxed than in China. They still try to call you into their stalls to look at their goods but they are no where near as pushy as the guys in China.

And we saw monkeys hanging out outside the Planetarium. Sweet.

The next day we took a bus to Melaka, a historic-type town about 2 hours south of KL. It was air conditioned. Awesome. While there we learned all about the Portuguese/Dutch/British colonizations. Melaka was a bustling trade hub run by local Sultans till the Europeans showed up around 1500 and basically messed it up. Melaka never recovered the glory of pre-European arrival. Way to go guys. Yeesh. We saw a church built in 1521, bits of an old fortress, and lots of dioramas. Malaysia really likes dioramas. The bus back to KL was not air conditioned. Boo.

Diorama number 85 of a sultans court

Next day, more monkey spotting in downtown KL’s rainforest park. Sweet.

Took another air conditioned bus to Kuala Selangor, about 2 hours west of KL. Saw more monkeys crossing the road. Sweet. We went to see a humongous firefly colony inhabiting the banks of a near by river. It was beautiful, but no photos turned out. Boo. After spending the night in the mosquito forest…whoops I mean the mangrove forest…park, we checked out some more Dutch ruins (and saw more monkeys…these guys could take over the country!) including an execution rock and poison well. Those guys knew how to get things done. Walked around the very nice mangrove forest (more details in a later post…stay tuned!) and fed the mosquitoes. Then one non-air conditioned bus back to the city.

Brad punching diorama number 105

Food was fantastic. We made an effort to find places that looked a bit like they could be a hidden treasure (ie down alleys, stalls at the markets and places filled with locals and not Westerners). It proved to be a good strategy and my belly was very happy at the end.

In conclusion, Malaysia is very humid and a delight. When you visit cross your fingers for air conditioned buses and if a restaurant/stall only sells one thing they’re probably really good at making that one thing, trust them.

Mmmm...random menu pick

An artist in Berlin (Nele Azevedo of Brazil)created 1000 ice sculptures of humans and left them to melt on the steps of  Gendarmenmarkt square to draw attention to climate change.

I must admit….the picture is creeping me out.

Exxon Mobil pleaded guilty to the deaths of 85 migratory birds. The birds died after landing in natural gas well reserves and waste water. Somehow I find 85 to seem like a fairly small number, considering the deaths took place in several states over five years (2004-2009). But at least it’s something.

Exxon Mobil is giving $600 000 for the preservation of wetlands as a result of the guilty plea and promising to improve facilities to prevent this from happening in the future. $600 000 is pocket change for a corporation this large.

While it is very refreshing to see a company actually admit it did something wrong to the environment, I find these days that I have such a high degree of skepticism about anything that happens that in anyway involves a corporation. They so often seem above the law and social norms.

I recommend watching The Corporation. It was very eye-opening for me. Happy watching!