| Yeah I was unhappy with the article as well. No board member agreed to be interviewed for this story, but the company disputes that it puts profit before people. That's the thesis of the article -- that there's a forced choice: either people or profits. And WalMart is choosing the wrong option. It's hackneyed, it's cliche, and if you want to run with it you'd better have something more than just a bunch of opinionated interviews. By choosing the right 20 people, you can get them to say just about anything you'd like. Where there's such a high-volume movement of people, especially involving at-risk populations, there's going to be crime. There are about 6,000 WalMarts in the United States. Worldwide, Walmart serves 260 million people at 12,000 stores every week, employing about 2.5 million people -- 1.5 million people in the U.S. alone. In 2013, the FBI reports 367 violent crimes per 100,000 people/years. I found this out in one minute of searching the internet. All of this is relevant context for a story like this. I'm not a statistician, but doing some simple math, assuming those 260 million people served every week just stayed at the store year-round, every year there would be 954,000 violent crimes committed at WalMarts worldwide. Of course that's just funny numbers, but even back-of-the-napkin math shows that 1) whatever number we get for estimated violent crimes at WalMart, it's going to be a big number, and 2) with a dataset that large, it's far too easy to cherry-pick individual crimes to make a case where none may exist. There still may be a story here. Beats me. Why am I digging around for stats online when some schmuck who wrote this was supposed to be doing all of that before he wrote it? And including it in the article? ADD: You know, if you know a few cops who think the crime down at WalMart is just out-of-control? That's a great story. Write it that way. |