Trophy Bikes owner Mike McGettigan went to extreme lengths Sunday night to convince visitors bikes sold by Wal-Mart aren't really bikes at all, but "bike-shaped objects."
McGettigan hosted more than 50 Penn students and community members at his bike shop at 3131 Walnut St. to watch a screening of Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. While passing around beer and munching on snacks, they watched the 90-minute film, which concerns the ramifications of producing cheap merchandise.
The giant retailer is the largest company in the world, with $285 billion in revenue last year and 1.2 million U.S. employees.
McGettigan was tired of seeing "students treated less as intellectual beings and more as consumers or walking wallets," adding that students buying Wal-Mart bikes are getting a bad deal.
While Wal-Mart offers bikes for less than $100, McGettigan contends that the "bike-shaped objects," as he calls them, are unreliable.
As a bicyclist and bike-shop owner, "one the biggest threats I see in everyday biking is BSOs," he added.
"They're not fun to ride, and they break a lot," he said. "They turn any bicyclist into an unskilled bicyclist."
Full-sized bicycles at Trophy Bikes start at about $250. Despite the difference in price, McGettigan is still surprised by the popularity of the cheap bikes.
"I see a shocking amount of Penn students on Wal-Mart bikes, and I try to explain to them why we can't fix their bikes," he said.
McGettigan says, however, that the perceived threat posed by the bikes was not the only motivation for him to hold the movie screening.
He also found "the treatment of Wal-Mart employees and customers so depressing ... [he] had to get involved." He sees the screening of The High Cost as part of a "national movement to clean up Wal-Mart or get rid of it."
The film shows the larger effects that Wal-Mart has allegedly had on its workers and community members.
It makes claims of exploitation of employees, poor security and sweatshop-style labor. Attendees saw several Wal-Mart employees say that they had been forced into working overtime without compensation. These employees complained that the health-care plan was so terrible that they often had to choose between health care and feeding their families.
Coupled with images of sick children and exhausted workers, these scenes elicited gasps from several members in the audience and chuckles from a few others.
Other charges made by the film include discrimination against blacks and women. Each discussion was juxtaposed with statistics, Wal-Mart commercials focusing on employee happiness or video clips portraying Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott as skirting or whitewashing the issue.
Wal-Mart has a different opinion. After the release of the film, Wal-Mart issued a 28-page statement in response.
The statement rebutted the allegation of discrimination citing Black Enterprise magazine's placement of Wal-Mart among "the 30 best companies for diversity".
Calling film director Robert Greenwald a "fantasy filmmaker," the retailer feels that the film is a "disingenuous caricature of Wal-Mart." And according to the statement, Wal-Mart saves its customers an average of $2,300 annually.
Those who viewed the film, however, seemed secure in their anti-Wal-Mart views.
Girard Hemminger, a Philadelphia resident, called the film "an eye-opener."
College senior Andrea Scott said that she "would never shop at Wal-Mart. ... It's pretty unbelievable what Wal-Mart gets away with."
