Keeping prices low… but how?

Wegmans food markets advertise some of the best prices you can find on all the 60,000 products they sell. Mary Ellen Burris writes in a column on Wegmans’ website that Wegmans researches and strives for the lowest prices they can. When a customer comes to them with a lower price they found somewhere else, Wegmans will research the matter and find a way to make their own price even lower. Of course, an article straight from the Wegmans website would give such positive information. Some research into why such large markets can keep such low prices showed some shocking results. An article on a website called Trees and Things explains the story of Deborah Shank, a 52 year old employee at Wal Mart who was hit by a truck driver and had to be payed for damages. Now as everyone knows, Wal Mart has the lowest prices on just about everything they sell. The Trees and Things article explains that Mrs. Shank’s employer pulled a legal card that reduced the money she would receive form $700,000 to about $400,000 and forced her to pay that money to Wal Mart. “Wal-Mart claimed it had the right to take any money its employees receive in a judgment or settlement to reimburse the company for their expenses in caring for the injured worker.” Mrs. Shank ended up being declared mentally incompetent, from brain damage due to the accident, and was placed in a nursing home. Thinking about how large Wal Mart is in America and how many employees it has, there are probably TONS of cases like this one where Wal Mart took money from its employees per their insurance policy. It is possible that the income Wal Mart makes off of taking insurance money from employees can explain a lot about Wal Mart’s prices being so low. One can only wonder what other means large markets like Wal Mart and Wegmans use to get more money and lower their prices.