The name of a huge American chain of stores — the biggest retailer in the world, and one of the biggest employers on earth. A single branch is enormous, more like a warehouse than a shop, and it sells almost everything under one roof: food, clothes, toys, medicine, televisions, garden tools, car tyres. The whole idea of the company is low prices in exchange for buying in gigantic quantities, and that is why it appears constantly in news stories and business classes as the example of a discount giant. Two things worth knowing. First, the spelling: the company itself dropped the hyphen in 2008 and now writes Walmart, so the form with the hyphen is the older one you will still meet in books and older articles. Second, it carries a whole social argument with it in the US — people debate whether Wal-Mart moving into a town kills the small local shops, and how it treats its workers, so the word often turns up in that critical sense too. There are no Wal-Mart stores in Taiwan; the nearest local comparison for a student is Costco or 大潤發, though Wal-Mart is far bigger.