Wal-mart: the high cost of low prices essay

Robert Greenwald uses a strong appeal to ethos, a slippery road argument, and a text track to bring attention to his audience about Wal-Mart. He establishes his argument by first presenting a claim made by the Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott and then showing the contrary to that claim with many examples from real people. Through these arguments the audience can determine that Wal-Mart is simply a bad company and they should stop spending their money there. Greenwald appeals to ethos many times throughout this documentary. He uses a strong patriotic tone this brings a sense of American values being tarnished through this company.

He establishes this patriotic tone by telling the stories of the “ average Joe” and how they’re companies had to close down due to Wal-Mart. These “ feel good” stories are ones that deal with traditional values that were set by these self-own businesses that were affected by Wal-Mart. Greenwald establishes ethos by interviewing regular Wal-Mart employees, throughout their interview they talk about family values and how Wal-Mart puts their family at stake. Greenwald also ties in the role of discriminating against races and women, this leads the audience to believe that all Wal-Marts discriminate against races and women and therefore are bad companies. Another powerful tool Greenwald unleashes is the heavy influence brought on by religions, he establishes this by interviewing rabbis, and preachers and showing how they too are standing up against Wal-Mart. This allows the audience to connect because religion is the number one way to influence people to rise up. He establishes a slippery road argument in documentary to make it seen that if one Wal-Mart opens up then all business shut down. He does this by presenting the story of hardware store and then showing random places that have shut down and put them through a black and white tint to provide a feeling of a ghost town to the audience.

Greenwald uses a confusing cause and effect argument by saying that if a Wal-Mart opens up then all small business will have to close down. He makes his argument stronger by starting off his documentary with a story showing that and then later on in the documentary showing another one, this makes the audience believe that this is happening everywhere. Throughout this hasty generalization and bandwagon feeling he establishes in the audience that if they don’t want to get left behind and if they want to be like everyone else then they need to start protesting against Wal-Mart. Greenwald throughout the documentary brings an elaborate use of text track to emphasis the claims against Wal-Mart and all their wrong doings.

He uses the text track to first explain all the subsidies and all the money that Wal-Mart makes by lowering their wages. He uses big bold letters and a big boom sound to put forth emphasis on the claims. Greenwald decides to show charts and many different numbers to show multiple claims on Wal-Mart. One of the biggest emphases throughout his text track was when he shows how much Wal-Mart has cost taxpayers. He decides to make this more emphasis because his audience are the taxpayers who are paying their money for a multi billion corporation to make money of them. When Greenwald begins to elaborate on the crimes that have occurred in Wal-Mart parking lots he uses speed to show the names of the states that have been affected this effect makes the audience see more than there really are, this provides a sense of fear in the audience to go to Wal-Mart since their parking lots are unsafe.

Greenwald decides to end with all the cities that decide to say no to Wal-Mart, he decides to do this to provide a bandwagon feeling to his audience since everyone is doing it we should be doing too. He uses the text track to show all the cities that made this movement once again he uses speed to and overlapping text to make it seen like more cities have rejected Wal-Mart. Greenwald uses appeals to ethos, slippery road argument, and a text track to show that Wal-Mart is attacking traditional American values and that it needs to be stop. He uses comedy by providing a clip of daily show with John Stuart criticizing Wal-Mart; he establishes his credibility by showing clips of new shows.

Greenwald uses the claims made by Wal-Mart CEO to establish his argument by presenting the facts that go against the claims made by him.