Walmart Safety Quotes

One example of a high-tech company that submits to a Graham type of analysis is Amazon.com. Though it does business exclusively on the Web, Amazon is essentially a retailer, and it may be evaluated in the same way as Wal-Mart, Sears, and so forth. The question, as always, is, does the business provide an adequate margin of safety at a given market price. For much of Amazon’s short life, the stock was wildly overpriced. But when the dot-com bubble burst, its securities collapsed. Buffett himself bought Amazon’s deeply discounted bonds after the crash, when there was much fearful talk that Amazon was headed for bankruptcy. The bonds subsequently rose to par, and Buffett made a killing.

There have been periodic attempts to stop the supersizing of the state. In 1944 Friedrich Hayek warned that the state was in danger of crushing the society that gave it life in The Road to Serfdom. This provided an important theme for conservative politicians from then onward. In 1975 California’s current governor, Jerry Brown, in an earlier incarnation, declared an “era of limits.” This worry about “limits” profoundly reshaped thinking about the state for the next decade and a half. In the 1990s people on both the Left and the Right assumed that globalization would trim the state: Bill Clinton professed the age of big government to be over. In fact, Leviathan had merely paused for breath. Government quickly resumed its growth. George W. Bush increased the size of the U.S. government by more than any president since Lyndon Johnson, while globalization only increased people’s desire for a safety net. Even allowing for its recent setbacks, the modern Western state is mightier than any state in history and mightier, by far, than any private company. Walmart may have the world’s most efficient supply chain, but it does not have the power to imprison or tax people—or to listen to their phone calls. The modern state can kill people on the other side of the world at the touch of a button—and watch it in real time.

When Walmart required its suppliers to adopt GFSI standards, many made significant investments and adopted more systematic and transparent food safety practices.27 Again, these are food companies that supply not only Walmart but other retailers as well. Yiannas