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Is Apple The New Walmart?

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All the gotcha stories on Apple of late has me wondering, is Apple the new Walmart?

The recent series of investigative reports -- true, false or exaggerated -- puts Apple in the cross hairs in much the same way Walmart often is.

It's all part of some classic cycle of American business, or so it seems. Build it up, cheer its success, profit from the stock rise and then tear it down for the very things that helped build it up.

The outrage over Walmart's Mexican bribery scandal has focused on the legalities and whether or not this could actually be the thing that puts a dent in the corporate structure, or sinks it entirely. The news cycle largely seems done with the subject, at least for now, but the steady stream of stories about Apple and some ambiguous wrong doing of a non-legal sort is just picking up steam.

Is Apple doing anything legally wrong by taking advantage of tax laws? Nope. Was Apple doing anything legally wrong regarding manufacturing in China? Apparently not. But Apple is big enough to be targeted by just about every group, activist and media organization for morally ambiguous business practices.

Does this mean that Apple is no longer a growth company? Is it so big that it's next phase is one of having holes poked in its methods in much the same way that Walmart has been treated for the past two decades? Walmart is not a growth company anymore, at least not in the U.S. And it's international growth could well be at risk pending the investigation into the bribery in Mexico.

And the fact that Apple has a target on it now makes me wonder of it isn't the new

Walmart.