(Google search went to Free Republic, so no link.)
Reuters
Weather Lifts Retail Sales, Profit Hopes Thursday August 7, 8:02 am ET
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A long-overdue stretch of warm weather across parts of the United States pushed July sales above expectations, major U.S. retailers reported on Thursday, prompting Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT - News) to raise its quarterly earnings forecast.
Specialty chains including Limited Brands Inc. (NYSE:LTD - News) also posted sales at the high end of expectations, boosted by summer clearance sales and early back-to-school clothing demand.
Wal-Mart, the world's biggest company by revenues, posted a stronger-than-expected 4.6 percent jump in July sales at U.S. stores open at least a year -- a key retail measure known as same-store sales.
The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer had said last week that sales might beat its forecast for a 2 percent to 4 percent gain after warmer weather helped it make up for weak demand for seasonal goods in May and June.
Wal-Mart and other retailers were left with heavy stockpiles of summer gear such as swimsuits and paint after an unusually cool and wet spring, raising concerns that they may have to slash prices and cut into profit margins.
However, in reporting its unexpectedly strong sales for July, Wal-Mart also raised its earnings outlook for the just-ended fiscal second quarter to 52 cents per share. That was a penny better than analysts had expected, according to Reuters Research, a unit of Reuters Group Plc.
The retailer had said in May it expected second-quarter earnings in the range of 49 cents to 51 cents per share.
Illegally in the U.S., and Never a Day Off at Wal-Mart
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: November 5, 2003
They came from Russia, Poland and Lithuania, and their tales of washing and waxing Wal-Mart's floors for seven nights a week sound much like Pavel's.
Last February, Pavel responded to an intriguing Web site that boasted of cleaning jobs in the United States paying four times what he was earning as a restaurant manager in the Czech Republic. He flew from Prague to New York on a tourist visa and took a bus to Lynchburg, Va., where a subcontractor delivered him to a giant Wal-Mart.
Pavel immediately began on the midnight shift and said he soon learned that he would never receive a night off. He said he worked every night for the next eight months. In this way, Pavel, who refused to give his last name, became one pawn among hundreds employed by subcontractors that clean Wal-Mart stores across the nation, paying many workers off the books.
Pavel's unhappy stay in the United States ended with a shock when federal agents raided 60 Wal-Marts on Oct. 23 and arrested him and 250 other janitors as being illegal immigrants. Yesterday, the company acknowledged that it had received a target letter from federal prosecutors accusing it of violating immigration laws and saying that Wal-Mart faced a grand jury investigation.
The 21-state raid last month exposed an unseemly secret about Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer: Hundreds of illegal immigrants worked at its stores, and its subcontractors appear to have violated overtime, Social Security and workers' compensation laws.
Company officials deny having known that illegal immigrants worked in their stores, saying they required their cleaning contractors to use only legal workers.
But two federal law enforcement officials said in interviews that Wal-Mart executives must have known about the immigration violations because federal agents rounded up 102 illegal immigrant janitors at Wal-Marts in 1998 and 2001. In the October raid, federal agents searched the office of an executive at Wal-Mart's headquarters, carting away boxes of papers. Federal officials said prosecutors had wiretaps and recordings of conversations between Wal-Mart officials and subcontractors.
The use of illegal workers appeared to benefit Wal-Mart, its shareholders and managers by minimizing the company's costs, and it benefited consumers by helping hold down Wal-Mart's prices. Cleaning contractors profited, and thousands of foreign workers were able to earn more than they could back home.
It was the week of the NAFTA vote in Congress. Both of us had high-stakes negotiations coming up and strikes were possible. She slipped a video into the VCR and we spent the next hour watching an AFL-CIO documentary about management intimidation in a workplace trying to organize a union certification ("card") election, which included the firing of key organizers, management required mass meetings of workers with heavy propagandizing on the "evils" of union representation, anti-union postering, one-on-one intimidation of individual workers. All the usual stuff.
Those of you in Southern California, West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio, follow Devin's lead and go visit the picketers who are locked out or on strike in your communities today. These folks are heros.