The Corona-virus’ Impact on Wal-Mart

Case Study-1 Nelson Lu RIT student

1.

Recently, Corona-virus, aka COVID-19 , has been crazily spread out since December of last year. My university has transferred all related activities to the online form to keep students safe and largely reduced the demands of going out. The virus changed mostly everyone’s lifestyle: people can’t go to the party, can’t hangover, can’t go to public assembly. Everyone tries to get as many groceries as possible. Moreover, the finance and economy in our society is a mass right now. Groceries companies like Wal-Mart, Wegmans, Costco have increased ton of sales revenue. They had donated millions dollars to help on prevent Coronavirus’ spread.

Corona-virus, according to the World Health Organization, was first emerged in Wuhan, China last December. It has infected over 110,000 people in at least 110 countries and has become the biggest threat to the finance and economy.

Wal-Mart has been always show up top 5 on list of Fortune 500 companies. Their sales increased in tremendous amount. However, Wal-Mart have ethical dilemma as well. As the coronavirus outbreak spreads in the United States, retailers, warehouse and customer service-related chains face new challenges: some of their workers are getting sick.

According to report, Wal-Mart became one of the latest U.S. companies to confirm it had a sick employee on Monday. The female employee works in Cynthiana, a small town about 30 miles northeast of Lexington, Kentucky. She became the state’s first resident to test positive for COVID-19.

Does Wal-Mart responsible for employees’ death? While they provides employment positions for those who need the work, they are facing lawsuit problems where workers die from Coronavirus complications. Wal-Mart’s large scale within U.S have became the largest target where people gathered. Now even if policies required Wal-Mart to shut down stores that include nonessential items such as clothing or electronics, Wal-Mart super-center, their inventory, grocery department and services still remain a large amount of people to maintain active for customers.

Responsibility: Wal-Mart faces unlawful lawsuits from a worker’s family who died of a coronavirus complication, one of two such deaths reported in the same Chicago area store. The legal complaint was one of the first such public cases against retailers, alleging that Wal-Mart had failed to properly respond to the symptoms of COVID-19 among several workers in the store. It also accused the company of failing to share this information with workers, failing to protect them with gloves and other protective measures, or failing to take appropriate measures such as grooming. Therefore, one of their ethical difficulty is when they try their best to keep their employees safe, they still have to take the risk of employees since they are one necessary part of the society chain.

Prohibitory: disregarding the financial loss from prohibiting selling nonessential items, Wal-Mart has always faces ethical dilemma where they need to responsible for employees and customers. Their economical situation is relatively not important in current situation. This prohibitory increased the shopping traffic significantly which increases the risk of spreading of Coronavirus due to demands of customers. When customers can’t purchase items from shopping mall, they increased their demand on choosing Wal-Mart groceries store.

Reputation: Wal-Mart’s reputation is dominantly affecting the whole world previously. Now their reputation is impacted by those sick workers’ cases and customers’ panic. Panic is from society, their reputation is related to the society panic. Thus, their ethical dilemma is where they contribute to the society with receiving negative comments.

Reference

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-impact-on-global-economy-financial-markets-in-6-charts.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/10/coronavirus-walmart-and-others-cope-with-sick-workers-fearful-customers.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/costco-walmart-target-stop-selling-non-essential-items-select-states-2020-4

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/07/828958077/walmart-faces-lawsuit-over-workers-death-from-coronavirus-complications

1. 

   Thank you for your comments. When we firstly think about Amazon, the first words come up is they strict to…

2. 

   Thank you for your comments! Knowing Wal-Mart is having such a ethical dilemma, we still can’t really understand why Wal-Mart…

3. 

   Thank you for your comments! I believe that all these craziness would recover soon!

4. 

   I think that Wal-Mart’s actions now make me feel dissatisfied. It wasn’t until last week that Wal-Mart asked employees to…

5. 

   Yes, I quite agree with you.As you said, it is important to follow up on the health of employees, which…