While companies all over the world struggle to reach the optimum balance of growing profit and increasing corporate social responsibility, Walmart is promising to once again bring work, and capital, back to America. Although an American company, Walmart has been importing more and more goods over the last 30 years and they aren’t helping increase the amount of manufacturing jobs in the United States. From a business ethics point of view, Walmart decided that profits are more important to them then providing employment to Americans, and contributing the regulatory tax dollars to the nation that they were built upon. Milton Friedman would be proud. Walmart’s actions over the past several decades has shown that they either don’t care or choose to ignore the predicament of the U.S economy. If there only mission is to strike a profit for their shareholders, which Milton Freidman states is the only “social responsibility of business”, then they are in a great position.
Even though Walmart is already successful, however, their prosperity in the United States could be in jeopardy if they continue investing in other countries. As Freeman’s stakeholder theory states, for a company to be successful they need to focus on keeping all the involved parties of the business content and refrain from prioritizing one over the another. And with a market cap of over $250 billion, Walmart won’t have a problem going back across the Atlantic, one more time.