ory needs to be told, and this paper will lay it out as close to its entirety as possible within the space limitations. Wal-Mart has not been a good corporation for American in many respects, and if this lawsuit is won by the women bringing it – and if justice is to be served, they will win – it will shake up the foundations of the biggest retailer, and biggest corporation, in America.
             THE BODY QUESTIONS: The financial impact the lawsuit could potentially have on Wal-Mart, should the women win their class action suit, will be substantial in the eyes of the lay person, but perhaps just a drop in the bucket to deep pocketed Wal-Mart. If estimates are correct, Wal-Mart brings in $220 billion annually, and it nets around $7 billion. That is an eye-popping amount of revenue, but then, with almost 5,000 stores busy with shoppers 7 days a week, $7 billion doesn't seem like that much. Without having the exact math in hand, nor the formula by which the plaintiffs are going to do their math, it's not possible to know how much this will cost Wal-Mart.
             The best conjecture this writer can come up with is that the positive financial impact on an hourly female wage-earner in Kentucky who worked for Wal-Mart three years will be greater than the negative financial impact on Wal-Mart no matter how many hundreds of millions they are obliged to shell out. For a single mother of three kids, a $5,000 to $10,000 settlement would mean clothes for the children, car payments, insurance (health and car), and some respect.
             But it is also possible that the negative publicity from a court decision that comes down against Wal-Mart would be so far-reaching and touch so many lives that Wal-Mart's future revenues would be harmed – which of course would be a direct result of the class action suit. It is also possible that the wave after wave of negative publicity – which would have its own momentum and would have fairly long...