True, Wal-Mart has very little illegal practices. Many do hire illegal workes for clean up crews, but other than that, they do everything within their rights. The issue that I have is, dispite the fact that they have record profits and are the biggest in the industry, they are so at the expence of the worker. Their workers are the lowest paid in the retail industry and get the least medical benefits. It is also very common to fire any Wal-Mart worker who ever even thinks of trying to unionize.
There's a book I'd like to recommend, and it's not a very big one, called Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. It was an experiment on her part as she worked under cover to see how anyone can live on minimum wage in certain jobs, one of them was Wal-Mart. There's many great anicdotes about how abusive Wal-Mart is to it's employees and sheds some light as to why many people hate Wal-Mart.
The other issue I have with Wal-Mart is that they are so big that they dictate to their manufacturers, Hasbro being one of them, how much they are are to charge Wal-Mart for thier products. This forces many companies like Rubbermaid to involuntarily move production overseas for cheeper labor.
Now, in the end, they do nothing illegal and it results in low prices for the consumer and maximum profits for Wal-mart. Is that a bad thing? Depends on how the individual feels. I personally refuse to buy anything from Wal-Mart, save for SW, because of their practices. It may not be illegal, but because something is not illegal doesn't mean it's ethical. They can more than afford to treat their employees much better, still have nice proffits and still give us the lowest prices. Costco proves this. Believe it or not, Costco has sales proffits that nearly rival Wal-Mart while paying their employees a living wage and decent beneffits. However, what makes Wal Mart bigger is Wall Street. Wall Steet simply doesn't like to invest in companies that treat employees even decently at the expence of proffits. Capitalizm at it's best, but at what cost to the American worker?