Karen Olsson’s Up Against Wal-Mart: Advocacy for the People Karen Olsson the author of an essay called Up Against Wal-Mart where Olsson posits the employees of Wal-Mart are quite literally “up against Wal-Mart”. Olsson goes on further to provide authoritative evidence to Wal-Mart's questionable practices in regards to the treatment of its employees. More specifically Olsson goes on to point out the success that Wal-Mart has achieved; the questionable practices involved in preventing employees from unionizing; and lastly the quality of life of the underpaid and overworked employees of Wal-Mart. According to Olsson Wal-Mart’s growth from a single retail store in 1962 to 3,372 stores as of 2006; is owed to the visionary and founder of Wal-Mart, Sam Walton (608,611.) To better understand the mentality of Wal-Mart in its current state of questionable staffing and pay you first have to understand how this company originated. As Olsson explains it Walton who constantly looked for ways to maximize profit and minimize expenses based his business on a fairly simple yet successful business model. That model being one in which high sales volume at lower prices generates greater profit margins. Walton’s frugality extended beyond just the selling of goods and making profit. He looked for ways to keep overhead down, payroll down, and even the personal indulgences a CEO of company might typically have. Olsson paints this very image of Walton: “The company grew, in no small part, by . . . frugality—a habit that started with Sam Walton himself, who drove an old pickup truck and shared hotel rooms on company trips and insisted on keeping the headquarters . . . plain as possible” (611). As you can see from the infancy of the company to the maturation of Wal-Mart frugality has been ingrained into the psyche of the company. With this mindset one can understand now how a way of life