The Wal-Mart Watch Blog
Marketing/Advertising

| Jan 28, 2010

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Walmart has a pretty spotty record when it comes to grassroots support groups. They can’t seem to resist the temptation to simply let PR firms make things up for them. There was the fake blog “Walmarting Across America” which, it was revealed, was actually organized by Walmart’s PR firm. The vehicle the “bloggers” used as well as their meals, expenses and gas, were all provided for them. There was the fake “community group” Working Families for Walmart, which was also run by a PR firm Walmart hired.

And now it seems that Walmart is doing the same thing in Chicago, where they’re struggling to get a foothold for their potential second store within city limits. Chicagoist, a prominent local blog, received some suspiciously pro-Walmart comments on their blog and decided to investigate. They found what seems to be theChicagoland Chamber of Commerce and Serafin & Associates are both working to push Walmart’s agenda in Chicago, and posing as a local community group.

The Chicagoland admitted to launching the site Our Community, Our Choice which proclaims, “Everyone else but Chatham and the South Side are making the decisions – It’s OUR CHOICE, NOT THEIRS.”

You should read the full article from Chicagoist, but the following section is particularly interesting:

Mike Mini told me that Wal-Mart is indeed a member of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, that they have “a representative on the Government Affairs Committee,” and that “our process is kind of open. Any member that expresses an interest can come to meetings and work on issues that are important to them.” Is the Chamber working on behalf of Wal-Mart in the city? “We’re working on behalf of policies that we feel further business and commerce in the city.” Because I got to Mr. Mini through Our Community, Our Choice, I asked what his involvement in the site was. “It’s part of our advocacy effort to gain support,” and that “we set that up as a way to communicate with people. We were expecting this to come up for a vote before the council sooner, but obviously it’s been stalled.” I asked him if he was familiar with Serafin and Associates. “Yes, we have worked with them in our strategy sessions. We’ve worked with [Thomas] Serafin and his team.” When I told him that our site had gotten comments from the email address that led me to him and asked if he knew that it was being used to comment on blogs, he said “no, not that I’m aware of.” Are you surprised that an IP address from Serafin was being used that way? “No, not in particular.” Why not? “I really can’t comment without looking into it further.”

| Dec 16, 2009

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Check out this e-alert our allies over at WakeUpWalmart.com sent out. You are encouraged to go sign their open letter to Mike Duke:

This holiday season, join us in sending an open letter to Walmart CEO Mike Duke calling for safe products, responsible business practices, and accountability.

As a November 2009 China Labor Watch report found, Walmart uses its size and clout to push suppliers to produce at a lower cost, forcing them to cut corners to meet Walmart’s price demands and still make a profit. One of the areas that suppliers could cut corners is product safety. Walmart has repeatedly carried products that have been identified as unsafe or dangerous by reputable consumer safety organizations.

Right now, there are children’s holiday gifts offered for sale at stores and online with high levels of dangerous substances including lead, chlorine, arsenic, cadmium, and bromine according to HealthyStuff.org, a project of the Ecology Center and the Center for Environmental Health. These products include Mrs. Potato Head manufactured by Playskool, a Walmart brand black and yellow frog wallet, a Disney Princesses pink belt, and an iCarly pink belt manufactured by Viacom.

This holiday season, join us in sending an open letter to Walmart CEO Mike Duke calling for better business practices and safer products for a safer holiday for all.

Thanks for all you do,

The Team
WakeUpWalmart.com

| Dec 03, 2009

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Back in July, Walmart announced a grandiose plan to create a sustainability index. The PR gains from this announcement were impressive, with glowing articles and few critics. It does sound nifty, a convenient little number on the side of every product, telling you just how good or bad for the environment it is. Just imagine it! You could look at that $3 plastic toy, encased in more plastic and shipped from China, and see just how bad for the environment it is!

Well, that was the idea anyway. It is now becoming less and less clear how this index will get started. You see when Walmart announced it was starting this index, they made it clear they weren’t really starting it, but funding a coalition of professors and nonprofits to start it. Only some of the leaders of the coalition that Walmart funded are now saying that isn’t really what they are doing. The Sustainability Consortium was instead, “established to pull in the best practices and information from the myriad of LCA (Life Cycle Assesment) data and certification guidelines surrounding products’ environmental impacts in order to produce standardized, transparent tools and methodologies that can be used to make good business decisions.” The Sustainability Consortium made it clear that they would not be developing a certification program, but rather would create a data tool looking at the environmental impact of products.

It seems, then, that Walmart is expecting the Sustainability Consortium to develop this magical product index (and take credit for it), and the Sustainability Consortium is just putting out data and expecting retailers, or others, to develop a product index. So will there actually be a sustainability index? Who knows? It doesn’t seem terribly likely right now. We hope Walmart will step up and use the data from the Sustainability Consortium to improve their environmental impact, but that doesn’t seem terribly likely either.

You can read the full article about the Sustainability Consortium here.

| Nov 30, 2009

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If you were only reading the major papers, you might think that was the case. They are all talking about how calm Black Friday was. If you look a little closer at some local press, however, you start to see a different story. At many Walmart stores across the country, fights broke out, crowds became unmanageable, and the police were called. Of course there were no tragic and fatal stampedes this year, but the stories coming out are disturbing enough. After all, anytime there is a change of bodily harm from an everyday task like shopping, there is reason for concern.

Here are a few of the stories about out of control Black Friday experiences:

Fight breaks out at Florida Walmart

Police and managers calm Upland Wal-Mart shoppers by emptying store

Black Friday: Police also called to Wal-Mart in Rancho Cucamonga

Black Friday shoppers at Wal-Mart scuffle over GPS units

Black Friday Walmart scuffle brings out police in Seminole County

| Oct 29, 2009

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Walmart has no store locations in the afterlife, but that won’t keep the company from making a few final dollars off their customers even after their lives are spent.

Perhaps crossing the boundaries of good taste, Walmart has gone public with a new, rather morbid product line: funeral supplies.  The company now offers an array of urns and caskets at various price points.  Finally, Walmart customers can take “comfort” in the fact that Bentonville caters to them from the cradle to the grave. 

Retailers offering funeral supplies is nothing new.  Costco has long had an eerie “Funeral” tab displayed prominently on its website, but no one kicked up any dust about it.  Conversely, Walmart’s line of caskets has fueled hundreds of pithy news articles.  Interesting.

Of course there is nothing wrong with selling funeral supplies.  Even so, I still agree with the media consensus here: caskets are a bad move for Walmart.  Why?  Because Walmart’s reputation is simply too tarnished for Americans to imagine (willingly) resorting to Walmart for such solemn purchases.  We grow up reading about the elaborate tombs sculpted by Michelangelo.  We can’t help but notice the silent, stately rows of headstones when passing a cemetary.  There is a certain beauty in that.  What possible appeal lies in a “Walmart brand” resting place? 

Then again, perhaps this is more a timing issue. 

Who thought rolling out a line of caskets right before Halloween was a good idea?

| 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 14, 2009

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In conjunction with the premiere of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, we’d like you to check out a few of our Waldemart Watch videos, again. Granted, the production quality in the real movies is perhaps a little better, but it sure beats Wal-Mart’s idea of entertainment.

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| Jul 07, 2009

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Thanks to our good friend Jonathan Rees for submitting this new book review of Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God And Wal-Mart. Dr. Rees is an Associate Professor of History at Colorado State University - Pueblo, and a contributor to one of our favorite blogs, Writing on the Wal.

Wal-Mart watchers are blessed with particularly interesting reading material these days.  Nelson Lichtenstein’s history of the company, Retail Revolution, will be coming out in July.  As it’s coming from a major trade press, that book will be difficult to miss.  On the other hand, Bethany Moreton’s scholarly study of Wal-Mart, religion and politics (already released from Harvard University Press) will probably have to be sought after by readers in parts of the country without an academic bookstore.  That’s a shame, because anybody who is interested in the cultural rather than just the economic significance of Wal-Mart needs to buy this book immediately.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart has more in common with Thomas Frank’s now-classic study of conservatism, What’s the Matter With Kansas?, than it does with any other book about Wal-Mart written to this date.  Like Frank, Moreton’s objective is to explain how it’s possible for evangelical Christians to serve God and Mammon at the same time.  While Frank’s answer was widely construed as condescending to evangelicals, Moreton treats the creation of Christian capitalism with the utmost respect, using the success of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. over the last 50-odd years as a kind of case study in how religion and materialism can live side-by-side in the United States, especially in the American South.  As she writes in her prologue in a direct slap at Frank, “Family values are an indispensable element of the global service economy, not a distraction from it.”

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| Jun 29, 2009

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Bloomberg is reporting today that Wal-Mart and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are among those opposing legislation that would allow the U.S. to cut off duty-free imports from factories in Pakistan and Afghanistan, if they fail to adhere to international labor standards on matters such as prohibiting forced labor and child labor. The bill, titled the Afghanistan-Pakistan Security and Prosperity Enhancement Act, is meant to help strengthen democracy in the two countries by creating “Reconstruction Opportunity Zones” and increasing their ability to export goods to the U.S. - and in return, it only requires that the countries make sure their factories are providing adequate working conditions.

Wal-Mart, however, is among those arguing that such labor restrictions would reduce any beneficial effect the legislation might otherwise have - and besides, if factories in Pakistan can’t export products to the U.S. because of labor and human rights abuses, Wal-Mart can’t then turn around and sell those products at their everyday low prices, right?

“Pakistan doesn’t have a good record in terms of child labor and the employment of women,” [Susan Aaronson, a professor at George Washington University in Washington who has written on trade and human rights] said. “This ensures the rule of law will be followed.”

The House bill states that each country “shall continue to receive duty-free treatment under this Act only if the President determines and certifies to Congress that Afghanistan or Pakistan, as the case may be has implemented the requirements set forth” - said requirements including insuring the following:

(A) compliance with core labor standards; and
(B) compliance with the labor laws of Afghanistan or Pakistan, as the case may be, that relate directly to core labor standards and to ensuring acceptable conditions of work with respect to minimum wages, hours of work, and occupational health and safety.

We’ve already documented Wal-Mart’s sourcing issues in other international locales, so it shouldn’t be all that surprising that they would oppose such regulations here. Links to summaries of both the House version of the bill (with labor requirements) and the Senate version can be found after the jump.

Obama’s Bid to Boost Exports From Pakistan Hits Snag Over Labor [Bloomberg]

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| 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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