So How Big Is Big?~~~Walmart A Country Unto Itself!!

People get very suspicious of large corporations and rightly so in many cases. People also get hysterical about large corporations for unfounded reasons. The attacks on McDonald for everything from their menu to their hiring practices and everything in between are prime examples. There are always similar attacks on Walmart especially when one is being built in your neighborhood.

So here is Walmart by the numbers(from an article in Daily Finance by Loren Berlin):

1.According to Fortune, Walmart sold $421,849,000,000 last year. The largest purchase most of us will ever make is our house: If all Walmart sold were new homes, which averaged $268,900 in April, that would be almost 1.59 million homes.

2. $421,849,000,000 is just about the same amount of money that the United States spent in 2009 for the entire year's worth of Medicare, the government program that provides health insurance to senior citizens and younger Americans who are permanently disabled.

3. That $421.8 billion is also about $9 billion less than Taiwan's 2010 gross domestic product -- the total value of the country's goods and services in a single year -- and $7 billion more than Norway's 2010 GDP. In other words, if Walmart were a country, it would be the 25th largest economy in the world.

4. Speaking of countries, let's talk population: Fortune reports that 2.1 million people work at Walmart, which means there are about as many Walmart employees sprinkled across the globe as there are people living in the African country of Namibia (yes, that Namibia, where Anegelia Jolie gave birth). There are another 95 countries with populations smaller than the retailer's sprawling workforce, including Botswana, Kosovo, The Gambia, Trinidad and Tobago, Bahrain, Cyprus, Qatar, Luxembourg, Belize, Iceland, The Bahamas and Greenland.

5. The company has 952,203,837 square feet of retail space, or roughly 34.16 square miles. That's just about 1.5 times the size of the borough of Manhattan. And that's just the stores: We're not even including their offices or distribution facilities ... or their gigantic parking lots.

6. Discussing parking lots, naturally, brings us to driving. According to Fortune, the company's nearly 8,000 drivers logged 749 million miles in 2010, the equivalent of circling the Earth not once, not twice, not a thousand times, but 30,000 thousand times. No wonder Fortune once called the retailer "Planet Walmart."

Yeppers that is BIG!!! So now you all have more reasons to HATE WALMART for what ever reason you choose but if you complain don't let me catch you shopping at Walmart. Make sure you go to all those Mom & Pop stores that we all love. WAIT!! They are mostly gone from the American Scene.

HMMM!! I guess I will go to Walmart, lol!!

Love ya,
Night