Bizarre WalMart factoid...

I went to a 24-hr WalMart Supercenter with one of my friends a couple of weeks ago, and she bought a few clothing items. The clothes are on plastic/metal hangers like in every other retail store, and when we went to the self-checkout aisle, we didn't know what to do with the hangers, because there wasn't a rack or a basket or anything like that.

So, I went to one of the cashiers and asked her, "What should we do with these hangers? We didn't want to just leave them sitting there for someone to pick up."

She told me, "Just throw them in one of the trash bins on your way out--we just throw them away anyway."

I almost had an aneurysm. Here's the math on the hangers:

About 138 million customers visit a WalMart every week. I am making a conservative estimate that 1/5 of those customers will buy at least one piece of clothing during the visit. That is 27,600,000 hangers.

TWENTY-SEVEN MILLION, SIX-HUNDRED THOUSAND HANGERS PER WEEK.

In a year, that means that WalMart is packing 1,435,200,000 non-biodegradable plastic hangers into our nation's landfills every year.

The cost of one plastic clothing hanger can't be more than a few cents when it is being shipped over from China, but at an estimate of $0.05 per hanger (I am just winging it here--if anyone knows, please feel free to chip in), we are talking about $71,760,000 per year spent on one-time use hangers.

This is insane. Granted, there are a lot of other things wrong with this company, but this blew me away. I would have thought that greed alone would have turned them to reusing the hangers, but apparently they just don't care.

I take the hangars and use them or give them to local emergency clothing walk-in. We are a sinfully wasteful society.

and planting some cotton. How disgusting...

I've already started going to Whole Foods and packaging all of my stuff in those paper bags they have in the produce section, but even that seems ovely wasteful. Why not have cloth bags that can be reused again and again and have one for rice, one for beans, one for various veggies...

BAH on industrialization!

they can order some clothe bags for you.

or a thrift shop next time. I love the Hospital Auxillary store here in town. The used clothing is of good quality and nicely displayed by volunteers. And I guarantee you they reuse their hangers! They have a list of items they have been able to buy with money from the store-so many wheelchairs, etc, that the hospital uses. Makes my heart good to go in there and find stuff.

There was a hospital thrift-shop near my childhood home and I bought almost all of my clothes there--the people who worked there were wonderful and they got some really amazing vintage stuff, from where, I do not know, but there it always was.

My first thought on reading this was that those hangers might come in handy in South Dakota.

Putting that aside, you raise a very good point. And I wonder how many similar examples of criminal waste can be found among other WalMart practices, or those of other giant retailers for that matter.

A saner country would regulate such things and impose stiff penalties for violations. I see this as just as bad as GE dumping PCBs in the Hudson River.

Any place there is a Walmart, there will be blue pieces of plastic strewn in the oddest places. Their bright blue color ensures they are not inconspicuous, either! Just another reason to despise that place...

Fundamentalist hatred of the environment (with misogynism, a core value in the Fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible): 1,435,200,000 non-biodegradable hangers rammed down Mother Nature's throat every year.

closets at the various agencies could make arrangements to have the hangers dropped into a container that someone from the agencies could pick up on a regular basis.

I don't even set foot in a w*lmart--but will see about talking to some of the local agencies about this.

and the styrofoam hamburger containers. Public pressure made then stop that one.

Just sayin'

Most clothing retailers I know of, department stores, Target etc, reuse their hangers. They only buy new ones because of broken hangers (it happens) or when hangers go home with clothes (this also happens). I mean damn, that's a huge monetary investment that a company has to make with almost no time saved...

I just bought some shirts for my sons and the woman at J. C. Penney told me the same thing. She said, "We're not allowed to re-use them."

:wtf:

to salvage the hangers were worth more than what they could buy them for. Disgusting.
If we had a decent media, this would have been news a looong time ago.
Why don't you email Keith Olberman about this. Maybe he'd like to tackle the issue.

Walmartwatch.com this is just another thing to slam them with. we are fighting one here. I'm going to use your wonderful math. Thanks

Wal*Mart is one of those companies that puts the screws on every single process it can, and I doubt all of them just throw out all those hangers.

that I would be able to get a straight answer if I started calling corporate hq or stores all over the country... might be worth a few days of effort to find out though.

TN Walmarts don't save their hangers; they go in the trash with everything else.

They are shipped on hangers.

Don't let them go to waste. South Dakota is begging for them.

that hangers seemingly reproduce on their own. Haven't you noticed how your hangers multiply if just left to themselves in the closet?

Have you also noticed that socks disappear? We usually blame it on the black hole in the bottom of the clothes drier, but the truth is (as my son the physics major explained to me recently) that socks are the larval form of hangers.

So Walmart's problem (and that of other such retailers) is that no matter what they do, the hangers are simply going to multiply beyond all reasonable limits.

bring environmentally irresponsible. If all of the major retail chains and the smaller ones shared between them, then there would conceivably never be a shortage OR an overage of hangers.

Of course, in our delightful pseudo-capitalist society, there's a big fat chance of something like that ever happening.

that sometimes it's cheaper to throw things out than to reuse them. Or maybe it just seems cheaper. I agree that it's wrong, and I'm sometimes surprised that some of the nicer clothing stores I shop at will let me take home very good quality hangers. Must be those hangers are likewise quite cheap to make, and the store simply has more than it needs.

What would China do with all those hangers?:shrug:


http://festival.sundance.org/2006/watch/film.aspx?which=402&category=DOC ">Ha Ha Ha America

Ain't just them by a longshot. This is extremely common, albeit wasteful.

they have hangers for sale.