The [Wal-Mart] corporate culture lagged way behind many other American corporations in terms of making progress on women's issues, and that had a lot to do with being based in northwest Arkansas.

The [Wal-Mart] corporate culture lagged way behind many other American corporations in terms of making progress on women's issues, and that had a lot to do with being based in northwest Arkansas.

Wal-Mart workers make just over $8 an hour, and they must pay more than a third of their health insurance premium if they choose to take the company's insurance. That means just about half of them don't choose to take the health insurance because they can't afford it.

The problem with Wal-Mart is that it's a business model premised on offering the customer low prices at any cost - any cost to society, any cost to workers. They've got a lot of competition and have influenced people to follow their model through simply providing a model that is so successful at making profits.

It's through neglecting all other values to bring the customer the lowest price that Wal-Mart ended up with such a horrible sex discrimination problem, but that model produces lots and lots of other problems as well, which I think are possibly going to be more difficult to fix.