China, India, and Wal-Mart: Issues of Price and Sourcing

Case 3: China, India, and Wal-Mart: Issues of Price, Quality, and Sourcing Introduction: Wal-Mart was the largest retailer in the United States and the largest corporation in the world because of the crusade, which meant all US products on the shelves by its creator, Sam Walton (Weiss, 2009, pp. 471). However, after he died in 1992, crusade evaporated, instead of US products, 98% of all of shelves throughout Wal-Mart (Weiss, 2009, pp. 471) are manufactured in China, Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan and India. Too-cheap-to-beat Chinese products are killing the US manufactories, which cannot afford to make products anymore and still make a profit.
Someone said that the Wal-Mart’s goal is only get the lowest price without regarding the quality which means Wal-Mart’s products from global markets are taking an increasingly vigorous public trashing because of product safety and quality concerns. Nonetheless, Wal-Mart still expands its purchases of Chinese goods (Weiss, 2009, pp. 472). Ethical Issues: According to this case, Wal-Mart’s ethical business management is related to the global environment, which consists of financial markets, cultures, technologies and government policies (Weiss, 2009, pp. 18). As the case indicates, the market also consists of hypercompetition from different countries such as China and India and regional players in the global environment. China has low cost offshore labor in the “flat world”, so that Chinese imports are so inexpensive to enter in U. S. So many factors lead most US manufactories to close the doors and eventually jobs are lost accelerate. The United States’ economic outlooks vary with regard to the global economy (Weiss, 2009, pp. 420).
In my opinion, the labor force is one of technologies in a developing country and it supports the globalization process. China as a global manufacturer and U. S. partner is a great source of world-class offshore technology services. Wal-Mart has its own external and internal stakeholders. The largest benefit able external stakeholder is a customer. As Wal-Mart, it sacrifices product quality in order to offer customers low prices. It is hard to justify that Wal-Mart is unethical without further investigation of overall impacts that brings to the customers.

As its internal stakeholders, the employees have more job opportunities because of expending its business scope and shareholders can benefit more in the global trade. In my opinion, moreover, the government as its external stakeholder, it can control the quality when the products import to the U. S. The technological environment comprises factors related to the materials and machines used in manufacturing goods and services. Wal-Mart has no control over its international suppliers, which should be controlled by the U. S. overnments, although it has ability to control its threats in the global environment. In conclusion, globalization makes hypercompetition and challenges to new and continuing leaders and professionals in organizations (Weiss, 2009, pp. 423). As the case indicated, the critic asserts that U. S. must stop Wal-Mart to continue to grow. However, I think it is not practical in a “flat world”, it provides the lowest price of the products for the customers after all. References Weiss W. Joseph. Business Ethics: A Stakeholder & Issues Management Approach. 5e