[__d__]

I've posted before about Walmart and I'll post here again. They routinely would pay us late and underpay invoices on delivered products. Sometimes racking up to $50-$100,000. The worst part for us is it would be an average of one year before they would pay it in full. You'd have to submit a claim and fill out endless paperwork to get paid. It was so hard on us as a company. You also had to pay them a per package fee that added up to a lot per year. No other company was doing this.

With Walmart trucking things were worse. If we delivered a product and it arrived not well, you had limited options on checking the reasons why. Several times we wanted to pull the temp recorder and just by doing that Walmart charged us around $1000 if we lost. On several occasions our own temp recorders were taken off of our product and were lost when we challenged their rejection of product, and in this case we lost. Even though the product shipped pristine. When our temp recorders were found on the product it showed that it did not ship under the terms of the agreement. In this case we won.

Again, to challenge this with Walmart I had to call or email more times then I could count. I always felt they purposely made it difficult.

[mc32]

This seems like anti-competitive behavior. When a duopoly exercises this kind of power, does it come under the purview of the FTC or some other oversight org?

One thing is to squeeze profits out of people, but it's another to say you cannot sell your services to anyone but me, is it not, unless there is some kind of contractual clause committing you to them, but given their size that still might be concerning?

[heisenbit]

Abuse of a dominant market position can carry a hefty price tag. I wonder whether they really thought this through.

[gech]

Does current economic theory include this common malfeasance among successful dominant businesses as efficient?

[computerex]

I don't think current economic theory even takes these common malfeasances into account. This is against the law, and so no widely accepted theory would even acknowledge this.

[digi_owl]

Yeah, at best the theory will assume this kind of behavior will be sorted out by competition. At worst it is just blankly ignored completely.

[kodablah]

Probably just foretells the rise of competitors as is the case here.

[AndrewKemendo]

Correct. Rational Choice Theory would expect that sub-optimal or inefficient actions from a single party would drive counterparties to competitive parties.

[amptorn]

Probably efficient for Walmart, sure.

[threatofrain]

I don't understand a mega-corporation delaying payment to employees. Is that part of a Fortune 500's business model?

For what little benefit do they gain by playing these low level wage tricks?

[mjcl]

I worked for a company that used fast payments to induce vendors to accept payment via "payment card." If a vendor wanted to continue getting checks or ACH payments, the payment would be processed 2 days before the late date.

In this case, the bank (WFB) had a payment card revenue-share agreement with the company, the commercial card version of cash back.

[reaperducer]

Is that part of a Fortune 500's business model?

Yes.

For what little benefit do they gain by playing these low level wage tricks?

The money from those who give up, and a year's worth of interest on millions of dollars from those who don't give up.