Chongqing, China
The Chinese government ordered Walmart to shut down its 13 stores in Chongqing in October 2011, after officials discovered it had mislabeled pork as "organic" when it wasn't. The stores were closed for 15 days as investigators looked into the matter, and Walmart was fined $420,000, according to the New York Times.
By the standards of Chinese food scandals, mislabeled pork hardly seems an egregious mistake, but a Walmart official said the company was "deeply sorry for the inconvenience," and that it was even more determined to meet China's service expectations. Those expectations, the Times notes, are often higher for foreign companies than domestic ones.
The power of China's giant consumer market and manufacturing industry has been able to force the corporate giant's hand on other occasions as well. Employees at Walmart stores in China, for instance, are allowed to unionize. The company has almost 400 stores in China.
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