The Wal-Mart Watch Blog
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| Mar 04, 2010

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Even wanted to know what it is like to live near a new Walmart store as it’s being developed? Well today is your lucky day! This blog, ENDURING THE NEW HURRICANE WALMART: A Daily Diary Of What It’s Like To Have A Massive Supercenter Built In A Formerly Quiet Neighborhood, from a local West Virginia news site is an ongoing first hand account of just that.

Here’s just a sample of what you would be in for if Walmart decided to move in to your backyard:

A beautiful tree-covered hill and a quiet Hurricane neighborhood have been destroyed in order to build the new Walmart and Hurricane Marketplace.

Neighbors, including me,
are being subjected to
loud noise that I can hear inside my home with the windows closed, bright lights shining in my bedroom window before sunrise, and several cases of our water being cut off.

Greedy city and county officials looking to grab more property and Business and Occupancy taxes are refusing to enforce city and state noise ordinances, and are also refusing to buy out the homeowners that are living next to the construction site.

Hurricane City Manager Benjamin Newhouse, and Cleveland Construction Supervisor David Koon have both demanded that homeowners move if we don’t like the noise. However neither is willing to cut a check for our homes.

The Putnam County Development Authority, which created this mess, refuses to buy us out and develop our land.

Has anyone else had an experience like this? Did Walmart bring excessive noise, traffic, crime, or pollution to your neighborhood, as they so often do?

| Feb 03, 2010

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Back in September the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Friends of Wilderness Battlefield, and six nearby residents filed a lawsuit in the Circuit Court of Orange County. They alleged that the country “supervisors failed to comply with the county’s comprehensive plan. The suit also claims the county’s zoning ordinance is invalid because it fails to comply with state laws requiring such ordinances to protect historic sites, and there were procedural defects in the approval process.”

Today, the court heard the first arguments of the case.

Here’s a quick excerpt from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s press release outlining their central arguments (it was emailed to me, so I don’t have a link):

“The County has an affirmative responsibility to protect those historic resources under Virginia law and under the County’s own Comprehensive Plan for development. Yet, the Board ignored the concerns, objections and offers of assistance from the Governor and the Speaker of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the National Park Service, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 250 Civil War experts, and others.

The Battle of the Wilderness, where 26,000 men were killed or wounded in May of 1864, may not be as well known as Gettysburg or Antietam, but it marked a milestone in the Civil War. It was the first time generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant met in battle. The site of the proposed 140,000-square-foot Wal-Mart superstore, along with 100,000 square feet of additional big box commercial development, stands on unprotected land within the historic boundaries of this battlefield.  It is also immediately adjacent to the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park, which was established by Congress in 1927. In a split vote, the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to approve a special use permit allowing the 240,000-square-foot project to proceed on August 25, 2009. This project poses a considerable risk of destruction and increased commercialization of a nationally significant and highly vulnerable historic site.”

We’ll certainly keep our eyes on the case. In the mean time, you can check out the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s website here and read more about the case here.

| Dec 24, 2009

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As the Christmas shopping season mercifully ends, Wal-Mart was caught in the middle of an improbable holiday peep show of its own making. In a town called Lower Nazareth, no less.

The early residents of Lower Nazareth Township, an Eastern Pennsylvania farming community, were a highly religious group, and displayed their faith by naming their community after the biblical town of Nazareth. The town doesn’t often get in the national news---but their Wal-Mart superstore literally put them on camera.

According to LeHigh Valley Live, managers at Wal-Mart secretly installed a camera in their unisex bathroom. The hidden camera was discovered by seven “associates” at the Wal-Mart Tire and Lube Center in the store---and these employees have now sued both Wal-Mart and the four store managers who ordered the camera installed. Three of the plaintiffs still work at Wal-Mart supercenter # 2252. The lawsuit was filed in Northampton County, Pennsylvania Court. According to the lawsuit, the workers discovered an “off the shelf” camera hidden behind a box in the Tire and Lube Center bathroom.
They were not drawn to this scene by a brightly shining star in Nazareth, but by the crude way in which the camera was mounted on a shelf, behind a box with a peep hole drilled through it. The lawyer for the plaintiffs says he has a picture of the camera. “They literally discovered it” on March 31, 2008, the attorney said.

When confronted by the workers, the store’s manager initially denied that a camera had been placed in the bathroom. But when he was shown a photo of the camera, he revealed that it was placed there to prevent shoplifting. “Loss prevention in a bathroom?” the plaintiff’s lawyer asked the media. “This is absolutely outrageous. It’s just plain inappropriate. There’s got to be something done. To have these people believe they can do this is beyond all comprehension to me,” the lawyer told the Associated Press.

The lawsuit states that Wal-Mart broke state and federal wiretapping laws, and violated their workers’ and customers’ privacy rights. The filing also charges Wal-Mart with intimidating the workers, forcing them to work in unsafe conditions, wrongful termination of several employees who complained about the camera, and violating their civil rights.

According to the litigation, the videotaping in the bathroom went on for at least several days before it was discovered. The restroom where the camera was placed served employees as well as customers.
Apparently efforts were made with Wal-Mart to settle this case, but no agreement could be reached. In the process, however, Wal-Mart fired two of its workers for putting the camera in the bathroom. “They violated our policy,” a Wal-Mart spokesman told the Morning Call newspaper. “When store management learned of the camera, it was immediately removed.” Yet the lawsuit claims that it was store management that installed the camera in the first place.

Named in the lawsuit were Wal-Mart’s district manager, the store manager and two assistant managers.

It is not clear if Wal-Mart’s policy is not to place cameras in bathrooms---or simply not to be caught doing it. The company says it took swift action to fire the workers who came up with the idea to secretly film bathroom occupants without their knowledge. Yet the company acted slowly in responding to the threat of a lawsuit, since this incident took place roughly 21 months ago.

Rather than quietly settle this lawsuit, Wal-Mart now has its policy on bathroom privacy being discussed in the national media. Wal-Mart shareholders are no doubt blushing over the company’s indiscretion in not settling this case ‘off camera.’

This story from a township called Lower Nazareth is not the kind of Christmas tale Wal-Mart was wishing for this holiday season. The ‘off the shelf’ camera used in this incident most likely has been placed back on the shelf at Wal-Mart, and marked down from its everyday low price for immediate clearance--with the tape removed, of course.

| Nov 17, 2009

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With Thanksgiving looming, and Black Friday (the busiest shopping day of the year) coming on its heels, it’s worth remembering the terrible tragedy that happened on Black Friday last year. In its eagerness to get to the “door buster” deals, a crowd outside a Walmart literally busted a door, surged in to the store, and killed a temporary employee in the process. His name was Jdimytai Damour and he died sheltering a pregnant woman from the oncoming throng. The aftermath of the event was upsetting as well. There were no consequences for anyone. Walmart struck a deal with the local district attorney, giving the community $1.5 million and offering an insulting and paltry $400,000 to all the victims of the stampede (the Damour family and several other individuals who were injured).

The only discipline Walmart received was from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration which hit Walmart with a ‘serious citation’ and a fine of $7000.

This article, over at the Southtown Star reminds us all of what happened last year, it is well worth a read:

Wal-Mart gets off easy in ‘Black Friday’ death

Only 10 days remain until Black Friday.-- All year, Wal- Mart has been busy, busy - occupied with damage control, lawsuits and district attorneys, making sure the bordering-on-poor American consumer will not let last season’s incident in which a Wal-Mart worker was trampled to death stop her from living better by spending the little she has at the world’s largest retailer.--
Jdimytai Damour, 34, died Nov. 28 after a mindless herd pressed heavily on the glass door of the Valley Stream, N.Y., store, breaking it off its hinges moments before the 5 a.m. opening, with the crush of shoppers stampeding over Damour and injuring other workers.

Damour, a 6-foot-5-inch, 270-pound temporary employee, was hired for the holidays. The bargain-hungry mob knocked him to the floor amid broken glass and trampled him. He died not long after of asphyxiation.

Video of the incident shows emergency workers attempting to save his life with CPR as shoppers continue to stream hurriedly past in pursuit of bargains. A pregnant employee also was injured along with several others.--

I’m writing to ask all Wal-Mart addicts to behave this year. And to recap what’s happened since the Black Friday tragedy.--
Let’s see: No criminal charges were filed against any of the approximately 2,000 people in the crowd even though the culprits are on video. Manslaughter might be messy in court when committed by a frenzied mob.

But don’t think Wal-Mart got off easy because it’s the biggest retailer in the world. No, no. The U.S. Department of Labor really cracked down.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration conducted an inspection and found that the New York store “fail(ed) to implement reasonable and effective crowd management principles,” including training that was “inadequate” to accommodate the advertised “Blitz Friday” that offered cheap-o electronics for all.

OSHA slapped Wal-Mart with a “serious citation” and the maximum fine of $7,000. Uh, no, I’m not missing any zeros. That’s seven thousand dollars. Wal-Mart Stores promised to implement a crowd management plan for its New York stores and went to work consulting with big-event security firms.--

Meanwhile, the deceased employee’s family sued for wrongful death, and Wal-Mart put out statements saying Damour had been part of the Wal-Mart family. Touching.--

The retail supergiant then cut a no-prosecution deal with the district attorney, promising beefed-up Black Friday crowd control along with generous contributions to the community - $1.5 million worth of local generosity and $400,000 in compensation to the victims of the incident.--

Next week, things will be different. While the special sales will commence at 5 a.m. Nov. 27, as in the past, the stores will have been open since 5 p.m. Thanksgiving night. This is intended to create a flow of customers rather than a ravenous pack.--
I hope the plan succeeds and that no one gets hurt.--

As Wal-Mart shoppers again seek cheap goods and to contribute to their future unemployment risk, let’s remember that it’s people who trample linebacker-sized door guys - not the global corporations that work all year to offer awesome, 32-inch flat-screen TVs for less than $400.

| Oct 21, 2009

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Check out this article from the Hunterdon County Democrat about a Walmart rally planned for today. We’ll try to get some pictures up later in the day!

A demonstration is planned for today at the new Walmart here, with some 300 to 400 members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union Local 1262 expected to hold what it calls a “consumer education rally” outside the store.

The local represents some 30,000 food service workers, mostly in supermarkets, in the northern half of New Jersey. The demonstrators gathered at a hotel in Woodbridge yesterday morning and would board seven or eight buses to come here, said Cyndi Spill, local communications director.

The rally was planned “to make the public aware of Walmart business practices, as far as not providing health care to their employees” and paying low wages. She said that in the union’s view the health insurance takes a long time to quality for and its cost puts it “out of reach for most workers” at Walmart.

Also, in the union’s opinion “they do not pay what we call a fair, living wage, something that you can raise your family on.” The rally was to “educate the public on Walmart’s impact on and cost to the local community,” she said.
While the union internationally has an initiative to try to unionize Walmart, Spill said “we’re not as a local to try to organize this location.”

Raritan Township police said they were aware of the demonstration.

| Jul 02, 2009

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Here are what the voices on the Internet are saying about Wal-Mart’s support of employer-mandated health care...not surprisingly, it hasn’t taken long for most to deduce that Wal-Mart is hardly acting in an altruistic way.

Number one on Wal-Mart’s hit list? Easy. Target. Because small businesses would either be exempt from the mandate or face a less-strenuous requirement, it would be Wal-Mart’s large competitors (and more specifically those who have to this point been better at managing health care costs than Wal-Mart) that would feel the brunt of the hurt.

Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic:

I don’t want to make too much of this: Wal-Mart may chicken out once the specifics of an employer mandate end up on the table. Even if they don’t, they may not lift a finger to help. And, make no mistake, Wal-Mart is acting--as it always does--out of pure self-interest.

My undestanding is that, after all of these years, Wal-Mart has suddenly found itself in the same situation its competitors once did: Dealing with unpredictable health costs and facing new competition from businesses that have found ways to spend even less on employee health benefits. Is there some justice there? You bet.

Reihan Salam with the National Review:

There is another way of looking at this. As a large, powerful, deep-pocketed firm, Wal-Mart can sustain regulatory burdens that mom-and-pops and new entrants can’t. And so burdensome regulations are invariably Wal-Mart’s ally. Jonathan Rauch explained this dynamic brilliantly in his book Government’s End. It makes perfect sense for Wal-Mart to back a regulatory initiative that hurts its bottom line as long as it hurts its competitors more.

Megan McArdle for The Atlantic:

Wal-Mart is always going to have a seat at the table when employer mandates are discussed, because Wal-Mart is the nation’s largest private employer.  Target and Macy’s probably won’t have a seat at the table.  So Wal-Mart can influence the rules in ways that benefit Wal-Mart at the expense of the competition.

Jeffrey Young in The Atlantic:

Based on the axiom that nobody in business or politics acts strictly out of altruism, it’s safe to assume that Duke and Wal-Mart’s board of directors concluded that backing the employer mandate would provide the company with some kind of competitive advantage. When I originally reported the story, it wasn’t immediately clear to me what that might be, though I suspected it must have had something to do with Wal-Mart’s calculation of how much money the mandate would cost them relative to other retailers.

Michael Cannon, for the Cato Institute:

A couple of years ago, I shared a cab to the airport with a Wal-Mart lobbyist, who told me that Wal-Mart supports an “employer mandate.” An employer mandate is a legal requirement that employers provide a government-defined package of health benefits to their workers...But it all became clear when the lobbyist explained the reason for Wal-Mart’s position: “Target’s health-benefits costs are lower.”

I have no idea what Target’s or Wal-Mart’s health-benefits costs are.  Let’s say that Target spends $5,000 per worker on health benefits and Wal-Mart spends $10,000.  An employer mandate that requires both retail giants to spend $9,000 per worker would have no effect on Wal-Mart.  But it would cripple one of Wal-Mart’s chief competitors.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce, quoted nearly everywhere (here courtesy again, of Mr. Jeffrey Young):

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce took a pretty nasty swipe at Wal-Mart when I emailed them for a comment. Here’s the statement the Chamber’s press office sent me, attributed to James Gelfand, its senior manager for health policy: “Some businesses make the decision to use the government as a weapon against their competition. We do not agree with this method.” Ouch.

| Jul 01, 2009

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This is it, so don’t get scared now.

The Orange County Board of Supervisors is set to make a decision once and for all on the fate of the Wilderness Wal-Mart - a public hearing has been scheduled for July 27th, which will be the last time the public (and Robert Duvall) will be able to make their opinions known before the board takes the matter for good. Note: As a Civil War vet, Robert Duvall can actually comment all he’d like.

What will they decide? Will Wal-Mart be allowed to desecrate a piece of American history? Will they be denied, and an alternate site be recommended?

There seems to be a divide between the County Planning Commission and Orange County residents - the Commission voted 5-4 last week to approve development on the Battlefield site, yet at previous public hearings, the majority of Orange County residents were against the project (by an estimated 2-1 margin). This public outcry, combined with the history of the land at stake, would make it seem appropriate that Wal-Mart would be eager for a compromise that would still allow them to develop in the area, if one were presented...but to this point, no dice. Which is why County Administrator Bill Rolfe believes it’s now up to the supervisors to make the “win-win” a reality.

“The question that begs to be asked is, ‘Why isn’t the county trying to broker a deal that keeps Wal-Mart in the county and moves it further away from the congressionally approved boundary line of the Wilderness Battlefield?’ Both would be in our best interest,” Rolfe wrote the Board of Supervisors in a June 15 e-mail...He noted two goals--that Orange enlarge and diversify its tax base, and not do anything that would “detract from the [Wilderness] battlefield as a tourism destination for our community.”

Rolfe went on to point out that the coalition of historic preservation groups currently fighting the Wilderness plan would appear to be amenable to a development located farther from the battlefield park. And it just so happens that just such a piece of land could be made available next to a nearby 51-acre retail development. The question is, will County Supervisors go for it, or will they doom the Wilderness Battlefield to witnessing another brutal defeat?

Seeking win-win in store debate [Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star]

Read the rest of this story ...

| Jun 25, 2009

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We hate to say “I told you so,” but....

Marc Gunther on ClimateBiz discussed Wal-Mart on his blog yesterday, and points out something we’ve been trying to get across as well. Even as its greenhouse gas emissions have begun to fall, the company’s overall carbon footprint has continued to rise.

As Gwen Ruta of the Environmental Defense Fund, a Wal-Mart partner, writes in her frank assessment of the company’s 2009 sustainability report, the problem is that all the good things that Wal-Mart is doing—increasing its use of renewable energy, driving efficiency in individual stores, improving its fleet operations and pushing up its recycling rate—are offset by the fact that the company is adding more stores and selling more stuff.

In late 2007 we released our own environmental report, in which we brought up the following:

Wal-Mart’s new stores will use more energy than its energy-saving measures will save. Its fleet of trucks, massive overseas shipping to import its goods, and the increasing vehicle miles traveled by its consumers all contribute heavily to CO2 emissions and the number of ozone-causing particulates released into the air. Its huge stores and even larger parking lots contribute to the degradation of our water supply, affecting our drinking water and the viability of aquatic life.

Wal-Mart’s response has been that by increasing its market share, it can replace less efficient competitors and thereby reduce emissions in the retail sector as a whole, even as it continues to expand. That might ultimately be true in the far, far distant future, especially if one day every store is a Wal-Mart. But in the interim, Wal-Mart’s total carbon emissions continue to outpace its efficiency gains. And as Gunther so eloquently adds:

If the Earth’s atmosphere could speak, it would tell us that it doesn’t care about efficiency or renewables or recyling—or market share.

Wal-Mart’s Big Problem: Climate Change [ClimateBiz]

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| Jun 18, 2009

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By this time we should all be aware of the controversies surrounding credit companies - in addition to increasingly complex and confusing options for credit applicants, credit card issuers have been raising interest rates and fees for many current borrowers, many of whom were in complete compliance with their card holders’ agreements when their rates were raised. This is a major reason behind the call for continuing credit card reform.

What many people might not be aware of is the struggle between credit companies and the retailers at which their cards are used. As Bloomberg explains, this could end in a giant Visa vs. Wal-Mart rumble:

Lawmakers are promising new rules to bring down the interchange fee, a charge on purchases sometimes topping 3 percent that’s split by the two banks serving the customer and merchant. Supporters of the legislation include the biggest retail chains, restaurants and small businesses, which say the fees erode profit and inflate prices...Interchange is the second-biggest cost after payroll, Target said, and merchants want to negotiate lower payments collectively without running afoul of antitrust law.

The issue has become such a hot topic, the Government Accountability Office has been ordered to study the effect interchange fees have on both consumers and merchants. The “interchange fee” is the fraction of every credit card transaction that the card’s issuer retains. When combined with additional smaller fees levied by a retailer’s own bank (to which the retailer first submits the transaction), interchange fees can cut into retailer revenue - especially important for those retailers with slim profit margins.

Interchange fees have risen over time - interesting, since technological advances would suggest the cost of such transactions should go down - and the result is a growing battle between retailers and card issuers. Wikipedia provides a surprisingly simple example of how the fees work:

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| Jun 11, 2009

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Image above from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

When Wal-Mart’s use of an intricate web of subsidiaries to avoid state taxes was discovered, the N.C. Secretary of Revenue famously sent tax lawyers and auditors after the world’s biggest retailer. With state economies strapped for cash, North Carolina is now looking to halt such shenanigans before they can start.

A proposed “combined-reporting” law would require companies with multiple subsidiaries operating in several states to file tax returns as a single business. Opponents of this legislation have given lawmakers the shivers...But in the face of the state’s biggest budget crisis since the Great Depression, combined reporting took a first step Tuesday toward becoming law. After a contentious House Finance Committee meeting, the Democrat-led committee voted along party lines to approve a larger tax package that includes combined reporting.

Combined reporting basically treats a parent company and its subsidiaries as one entity for tax purposes. A driving force behind the move was the public realization of just how much money North Carolina has been losing through loopholes in its tax laws.

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