Wal-Mart: the high cost of low prices (film review)

Tam and I went to see this film at the Roxy last night (an event sponsored by the Party Progressive and Buyblue.com (1)). It included the following accusations against Wal-Mart:
* WM puts locally-owned businesses out of business
* WM pays and promotes women and minorities significantly less, or should I say, never.
* Owners donate very little money to charity (while Bill Gates donates 58% of his income, by comparison, the Waltons donate about 2%). Also, employees may donate to help other employees in times of crisis; employees donated several million; the Waltons donated $6,000.
* WM provides security for inside the store, but not the parking lot. In many communities Wal-Mart parking lots have the highest incidence of crime in the county. (2)
* WM destroys downtown economies, keeps people away from downtown streets (making them unsafe, among other things).
* WM doesn't pay employees enough to live off.
* WM employs sweatshop labor practices in developing countries and fires US employees who attempt to make conditions comply with the law.
* WM encourages employees to use public assistance when they cannot make enough to live off of. Employees use an enormous amount of public subsidy in many forms (food stamps, Medicaid/care, etc.).
* WM Union-busts.
* WM maintains environmentally-damaging practices until shamed into changing them by the media (despite repeated requests from local gov't officials over many months)
* What did I forget?

We watched about 10 minutes of the rebuttal movie, but then I got tired (and it was boring). The arguments presented were:
* people love to work at Wal-Mart (example, 90-year-old woman who has worked there for 15 years, since retiring). (3)
* poor people need to buy things at low prices to get by. (4)

Overall, I wouldn't say it was a good movie. It attempted to be inflammatory. It tried to manipulate the viewers emotions. And worst of all, it wasn't pretty.

What do you do? Wal-Mart may be bad, but the reality is that most stuff is made in sweatshops and most businesses exploit their workers. Here's Tam's and my 2-pronged plan:
1) Shop at locally-owned businesses esp the owner-operated (co-op?).
2) Shop low on the... shop-chain. That is, buy used stuff. When you can't find it used, look for that "made in the USA" tag we used to covet so much in the late 70s.

Endnotes:
(1) Buyblue.com lists companies that donate money to the Democratic Party (as far as I can tell). Sure, this may help fight the Republicans, but isn't the point more to take back our country FOR OURSELVES? That means supporting locally-owned businesses so that someday we may have a strong middle class again. Without distribution of income, I don't see how we can have a successful democracy.
(2) The information about crime in the parking lots was the only new information to us.
(3) Why is it that she doesn't want to retire? Also, she surely doesn't need to work; so, how is it that this is a good argument in WM's favor? Some people who work their actually need the income to support their families.
(4) Why do you think that these people are poor? It's like the old song says "I owe my soul to the company store." Most WM employees just turn around and spend all their income in the store again bc they can't afford to shop anywhere else. In this way, WM is perpetuating its own economy.