Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005)
Brave New Films

Description

Everyone has seen Wal-Mart's lavish television commercials, but have you ever wondered why Wal-Mart spends so much money trying to convince you it cares about your family, your community, and even its own employees? What is it hiding?

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price takes you behind the glitz and into the real lives of workers and their families, business owners and their communities, in an extraordinary journey that will challenge the way you think, feel... and shop.

Collected reviews and ratings

9.5 DVD Verdict | Russell Engebretson

The film succeeds admirably on its own terms. Despite its muckraking pedigree, the film is rigorously researched and fact-checked, and it's the finest piece of filmic investigative journalism I've viewed in years.
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9.2 Entertainment Weekly | Owen Gleiberman

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price is an investigative outcry driven by stringent reporting rather than attitude. Mixing statistics and employee testimony, Greenwald details business practices that provoke a gathering outrage.
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9.0 Salon.com | Andrew O'Hehir

Robert Greenwald's new film, "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices," has subjected the retail industry's Goliath - already on the defensive after waves of lawsuits and bad publicity - to new and harsh scrutiny.
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8.8 TV Guide | Ken Fox

Important, awareness-building documentary.
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8.0 New York Times | Anita Gates

"The High Cost of Low Price" makes its case with breathtaking force.
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7.5 digitallyobsessed.com | Jon Danziger

The filmmaking is rather clumsy and ham handed, but the material is nothing less than scandalous—of course, Robert Greenwald's arguments go unanswered here, but if even a fraction of what is in here is accurate, the real scandal is not that Wal-Mart does things that are illegal, but that they are legally allowed to get away with outrage after outrage.
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7.0 Los Angeles Times | Kenneth Turan

"Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" is an engrossing, muckraking documentary about the retail giant that's been called "the world's largest, richest and probably meanest corporation."
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6.0 Empire | David Hughes

With more thorough editing this could have been on a par with Greenwald's previous films. His source material is gripping, but not life-changing.
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