Fortune 500 Companies and Why You Should Hate Some of Them

Fortune Magazine has released it's top 500 companies from 2007. A look at them can tell us a few things about the world we live in and why we need to make a few changes. I will admit that this area is not me specialty but this blog is a place for me to rant and rave, not necessarily be accurate... Though I do research my comments as best I can and try to cite my sources as often as possible. This entry is mostly a knee jerk reaction the the Yahoo article about the Fortune 500 article.

The number 1 company is Wal-Mart. Most people who know me know I hate them but for so many more reasons that you would expect. For starters, the simple answer, Wal-Mart puts the little guys out of business and ends the rule of generations of Mom and Pop run stores. They do this by introducing low prices to a community. Americans love a bargain and swarmed there for years, and continue to keep Wal-Mart a hugely successful company. But are low prices what Walmart really brings? Or do they just bring cheaper goods?Cheaper and lower prices are 2 different things. Walmart is so big now that non-cheaper goods are only available at specialty stores and are considered over priced. The brands Walmart has introduced are now the regular, everyday throw away brands we have come to expect.

How about customer service? Have you ever had good customer service in a Wal-Mart? I have been in retail for most of my adult life and most customers and trade magazines report the same thing, there is no good customer service left in America. They bitch about it non stop and yet the store most notoriously linked to poor customer service is the #1 company in America. So do you really care about good customer service or is it really price first? Next time you need something that you can shop around for try rewarding the store that provides the best customer service and not the best price. Why? Do you really think that item cost you that much more at a different store?

What if I told you Wal-Mart was bad for the American economy. Walmart is America's single biggest employer but offers the lowest wages and worst benefits. They are a drain on every community they are in. Walmart management is trained on how to get their employees on state support because they refuse to offer a living wage and affordable medical insurance. And that's to their few "full time" employees, most employees are aren't ever offered the unaffordable benefits because Walmart positions are only part time, even if the employee works an average of 40+ hours. Walmart has had numerous legal problems in this department and has lost a number of class action lawsuits. You would think the largest company in the WORLD could offer decent health care insurance. I have worked for a number of large companies and they all offered good and affordable benefits based on covering hundreds or thousands of people.

I have more but I will be saving some of my anger for the #2 company on the list, Exxon Mobile (Also the most profitable company IN THE WORLD for 2007). But that is another post.

Good News From Sweden

I got this info from a great blog I frequent called The Weight of the Evidence. Apparently a Doctor in Sweden got their National Board of Health and Welfare to agree that a low carb diet is "in accordance with science and well-tried experience for reducing obesity and Type 2 diabetes." This has sparked much discussion with the powers that be in Sweden and their newspapers have picked it up. Part of the conflict is centered on the fact that this Doctor wrote an open letter to schools calling for more healthy fats in the diet of children. The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet polled their reader as follows:

Vad tror du att barn mår bäst av?
[translation: What do you think that children are better off with?]

Choices:

Fet mjölk och smör
[translation: Fat milk and butter]

Lättmjölk och margarin
[translation: Skim milk and margarine]

As of this writing, 27,836 have cast a vote in the poll and 89.6% have answered the Fat milk and Butter!

So the newspaper readers of Sweden understand the difference between "whole foods" and processed food. Anyone believing that margarine, a completely chemical "Frakenfood," is better for you then butter has a disturbing world view.

Most dairy products are processed unless you are buying "Raw Milk." Info on Raw Milk can be found at http://www.westonaprice.org/. Raw milk has been outlawed in most of the US because 1 person died from a reaction to it. Another case of the government overstepping it's bounds and meddling in our private lives. I guess the raw milk people don't have as much money as big tobacco.

I Can't Even Call it Journalism

I just giggled my way through a newspaper article from the Arizona Republic. Apparently the writer has taken it upon herself to declare that the low-carb diet fad has ended. I have no idea who Karen Fernau is or what dog she has in this fight but she went to two solid experts on the topic, Cynthia Harriman, spokeswoman for the Whole Grain Council in Boston and Wade Moises, chef at Sassi, a high-end Italian eatery in Scottsdale, Ariz. Two people who are intimately familiar with the low-carb lifestyle. Let's see what they had to say.

Cynthia says, "The carb mania finally has subsided." And now she can go back to making money!

Chef Moises says,

"It never made sense to me that people believed that if they stayed away from pasta for more red meat they would be thinner and healthier. Those of us who know the power of pasta survived the attack by realizing that moderation eventually will prevail."

Well, it makes sense to me and plenty of other people who have taken the time to learn about it. It is pretty easy to understand and has been the way humans have eaten for the last few million years, except for the last 10,000 or so (just the blink of an eye on the time line).

What kind of nutritional value do these carbs provide us? Let's see what Karen Fernau tells us:

"Pasta is fortified with folic acid, an essential B vitamin. A half-cup serving contains a mere 99 calories, less than half a gram of fat and less than 5 milligrams of sodium."

So pasta isn't good for us but the folic acid that it is fortified with is good for us. So she thinks a processed food is good for us. Let's think about grains and how edible they are. Oh wait, they aren't edible. First they need to be harvested in huge quantities to give us any usable quantity. Then they need to go through a process to convert the hard waxy kernels into something at least digestible. Next they are stripped of all their fiber and nutrients for shipping and an extended shelf life. Finally, they are ground into a fine powder and bleached. Mmmmmmm, sounds yummy so far. Somewhere in the process the folic acid is added to give the product an once of nutrition.