Wal-Mart

The Wal-Mart Corporation

Wal-Mart is a family own company (The Walton's, founded in 1962) that has become the biggest retailer and grocery company in the world. The company started publicly trading in the New York Stock Exchange in 1972. It is the third largest public corporation and the biggest private employer in the world, employing more than 2.2 million employees. As of August 2012, has total revenue of 447 billion dollars. There are more than 8790 Wal-Mart stores in more than 16 countries and under 55 different names. The company has 4434 Wal-Mart stores, including the Sam's Clubs store in the United States along and the remaining stores location are in Mexico, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, German, China, and many other countries. We’ll explain why Wal-Mart is so successful over other retailers and grocery stores, especially concerning customers spending less and saving more.

Role of ethics and compliance in financial environment

With so many Wal-Mart stores located around the world, there are different ethical rules, laws, and customs that apply. Wal-Mart updates its Statement of Ethics to accommodate each country’s set of rules and customs.

The importance of ethics is to identify both the rules that should govern people’s behavior and the “goods” worth seeking. Wal-Mart's ethics included values such as integrity, respect, trust, dignity, and responsibility (MMR, 2011). To help Wal-Mart maintained its values, the guidelines principles were establish to keep employees from committing unethical decisions. Wal-Mart leads with integrity and expects others to work with integrity as well (wal-martstore.com, 2001). Since Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart, it always has been a value-based, ethically led company. The values are broken down in three basic beliefs. The first belief is to have respect for the individual. The second is service to our customers. The third belief is always to strive for excellence.

In the tradition of Sam Walton, the...