Friday Blog Roundup: Shareholders Edition

SHAREHOLDERS MEETING: MORE SHOW, LESS SUBSTANCE
Carrie Underwood and Keith Urban are going to be performing in Bentonville next week! And some band we’ve never heard of called Lifehouse (and Taylor Swift)! WE’RE SO EXCITED ABOUT THE ENTERTAINMENT WE CAN’T EVEN REMEMBER WHY THE MEETING IS HAPPENING IN THE FIRST PLACE oh wait, yes we do.

Wal-Mart to Shareholders: Just Say No [The Iconoclasts]

Lay up groceries and rent some DVDs before the Wal-Mart shareholders descend on Fayetteville and occupy the city next week. The big annual meeting is scheduled for June 6 at the University of Arkansas, the corporate giant’s wholly-owned subsidiary. They are coming to be entertained and to vote against any shareholder proposals to reform policy or hold management responsible for their actions.

Wal-Mart’s habit of entertaining visitors rather than conducting actual business has everyone raising eyebrows:

Wal-Mart’s green efforts becoming a smokescreen? [BloggingStocks]

Next week’s annual shareholder’s meeting in Fayetteville should once again be more spectacle that business.Last year, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) seemed to spend more money lining up speakers, having pieces of its global operations dance with flags and having a pep rally rather that digging into issues.This year, expect the same—as the retailer has already opposed all the shareholder proposals anyway, so it should be a nice, big party full of entertainment. Nothing else.

Wal-Mart’s emphasis on entertainment have activists decrying the retailer’s lack of commitment to the social issues on this year’s proxy. Pam’s House Blend states,

Call me less than flabbergasted, but Wal-Mart is opposed to a shareholder proposition to add gender identity and expression to their non-discrimination policy...this is the second major corporation we’ve tracked at Pam’s House Blend that has used their DiversityInc rating (Wal-Mart was no. 41 of top 50 company’s for diversity in 2007; Verizon was no 1 on the same list for 2008) as to why the corporation doesn’t feel a need to specifically add gender identity and expression language into their non-discrimination policies.

After the jump, Menu Foods settles with pet owners over melamine-tainted food, Wal-Mart’s environmental policy, classified ads and look out! There’s scorpions in the watermelons!

MENU FOODS SETTLES WITH PET OWNERS, OWNERS PREPARE WRATHFUL REVENGE
Consumerist posted on Menu Food’s $24 million settlement with pet owners following a rash of melamine-tainted dog food, and commenters wrote in saying what we’ve all been thinking: you can’t put a price tag on a beloved pet’s life.

• “I would want a lot more then my expenses. Someone people are very close to their pets. I would want emotional anxiety money. May sound frivolous, but, they’re right, those companies need to feel the pain.”
• “I agree completely. Unfortunately the people that make laws don’t see it that way, and consider pets possessions, and therefore only worth what you paid for them, or what the cost would be to replace them. I think it’s absolutely absurd and that it needs to change.”
• “I think the CEOs should also have to verbally apologize, in person, to all the people (especially children) whose dear pets died.”
• “If they knew about [the tainted food], and still let it out the doors, I would say they are against some animal cruelty laws or something, and that would bring on jail time.”
• “Outsourcing production to China probably has saved them that many times over, so there really only is an incentive to keep buying sub par and unsafe products from Asia.”
• “Many pet owners, including myself, would gladly pay more to have food made with a little more care, here in the US.”
• “I hope dog food execs find a special place in hell, where they find themselves allergic to trace amounts of cat dander and their pants are filled with red meat.”

MORE WAYS TO DIE FROM WAL-MART PRODUCTS
This story got picked up by no fewer than fifteen different newspapers this week. I love “scorpion stings girl” stories as much as the next person, but really, we should all expect this of Wal-Mart by now.

Warning: There Are Scorpions In The Walmart Produce Department [Consumerist]

12-year-old Megan Templeton was shopping with her father for some watermelons and hamburgers for their Memorial Day cook-out when she was stung by a stowaway scorpion that had made a home in the produce section of her local Walmart...The sting was harmless, but it caused a stir at the West Virginia hospital where Megan was treated. No one had ever seen a scorpion sting before. “They had to look it up on the Internet because it is so unusual in the area,” Megan’s father said. “Everybody came down to look at it.” Walmart says they’ll be checking that watermelon shipment for more scorpions— just in case.

FILE UNDER “W” FOR “WTF?”
Craigslist sells stuff cheap - way cheaper than Wal-Mart, AND it’s all recycled, which is only an added bonus. But neither of those really help explain why Wal-Mart has launched an online classifieds site. So far it’s all people’s pets and apartments. Huh?

Walmart Launches Classified Listings [TechCrunch]

Walmart has a mixed history of success with Web businesses, but Walmart.com attracts 26 million visitors a month in the.U.S., according to comScore. Amazon attracts 47 million.

The classifieds listing’s went up quietly last week on Walmart’s site. The deal should help Oodle compeet against eBay’s Kijiji, which recently passed it in in the U.S., with 2 million unique visitors in April, versus 1.3 million for Oodle.

Craigslist’s new competitor, the Walmart Classifieds [ExpertSEM]

Walmart is receiving its listings from Oodle and being paid to do so; craigslist is a user-driven list site that is populated by people posting what they want to sell or buy. Craigslist has a gracious amount of categories right when you land on the website; Walmart Classifieds forces you to click on a More button to show you the options that are in that particular category. I have used craigslist before, so I am partial to its interface and functionality. And the hassle of going through a few different websites to look at an apartment or buying an item is a little bit more work than I want to do. I’d rather deal with the seller one-on-one and craigslist honors that. My vote is for craigslist.

SOLAR PANELS MISS THE POINT ENTIRELY.
Wal-Mart’s installing solar panels on one of its stores in Canada! That’s great! Oh, but aren’t there 4,597 other stores around the world that DON’T have solar panels? If Wal-Mart’s planning to make this big a deal out of every store they put panels on, we’re going to be hearing about this process for the next decade and a half…

Wal-Mart to Install Gigantic Solar Panels [Huffington Post]

Wal-Mart Canada announced plans this morning to build the country’s largest rooftop solar-energy system atop a new Supercentre planned for Markham later this year, a project with potential to spread across the retailer’s national chain.

Adriana Kojeve’s interview with author Joshua Frank explains no matter how many solar panels Wal-Mart puts on its roofs, the company’s business model remains inherently unsustainable.

Environmental Politics and Election 2008 [Dissident Voice]

[Reducing oil consumption] will involve some sacrifice of course. We’ll probably have to give up Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, or meat in general for that matter — but people will benefit, as will the ecology of the planet. Currently it is still quite profitable to pollute and suck minerals and oil out of the ground. It’s the capitalist way. Exxon-Mobile is the most profitable company in the history of the world for a reason. If we can become less reliant on these resources to survive, these industries will be forced to change, or be abolished altogether.

Also of note in environmental news, Tennessee withdrew from Wal-Mart’s state capitol energy audit program for no apparent reason.

What Does Tennessee That Others Don’t? [Writing on the Wal]

What kind of unrelated issues would stop an energy audit? What possible direction could the governor want to move? I wonder if Gov. Bredesen has second thoughts about non-state employees crawling around in the duct work.

And I have to wonder why such a hyper-local story was covered by the AP and not a local paper.

Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Friday, May 30, 2008

Click Here for a Printer-Friendly Version