Wal-Mart Announces Healthy Food Initiative, Fried Chicken Store Openings.
Two news items listed side by side caught our attention this morning, and gave us pause as a ridiculous example of hypocrisy in marketing. Wal-Mart announced plans today for “healthier on-the-go eating” options. The retailer plans to install non-fast-food eateries in several stores. From the Associated Press via Arkansas Business:
Walk into an area Wal-Mart with hunger pains, and you will have the chance to order a cheeseburger and fries from a McDonald’s restaurant inside. In a matter of months, customers could have a different choice, perhaps a panini and a smoothie.
But in almost the same breath, Wal-Mart also announced plans to open Pollo Campero eateries - which specialize in fried chicken - in stores across the country. From the Associated Press:
Pollo Campero, a Latin American fried-chicken favorite that had been seen in the U.S. only in takeout boxes aboard arriving flights, has teamed up with Wal-Mart to expand its reach to the nation’s growing Hispanic population.
Much of this contradictory juxtaposition is about demographics: while Wal-Mart is still trying to go upscale in many areas of the country, it’s also broadening its appeal to Hispanic shoppers in the south. The company’s duplicity here is telling of its broader marketing strategies - it goes to show that Wal-Mart will make changes only when it suits the company. Though executives are selling the proposed “Camille’s Sidewalk Cafes” as good for their customers, the reality is that Wal-Mart is only interested in what sells. The company should drop its veneer of altruism and focus on low prices: its platitudes to social responsibility are tiresome.
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Monday, May 12 | 1 comments | Permalink
Asda Launches Green Marketing Campaign
While doubts and questions continue to swirl around Wal-Mart’s green initiatives, the company’s UK branch Asda has spent considerable time and energy making....a movie! Rather than improving its business practices, Asda has spent several thousand dollars trying to CONVINCE consumers that it’s improving its business practices. Perhaps the company would be better served to actually make those changes, rather than just try to sugarcoat their environmental policy.
Asda pushes green credentials [Mad.co.uk]
Supermarket giant Asda is set to launch a new 30 minute documentary in a bid to highlight its efforts to tackle waste, cut packaging and source more sustainable products.
‘People, Prices, Planet’ has been created by production company Lion Eyes and will be broadcast on Information TV every night for the next three weeks.
The documentary aims to reach opinion formers such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, as well as government departments and MPs.
In addition, the short film will be used as an internal communications tool, targeting the Asda workforce.
‘People, Prices, Planet’ is split into six sections, each focusing on a different aspect of the Wal-Mart owned supermarket’s green operations.
These include sourcing sustainable orange juice, Asda’s distribution network that includes shipping 70 per cent of its non-food imports, rather than moving them by road and what the company is doing to reduce packaging and lower waste.
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Tuesday, May 06 | 16 comments | Permalink
The Price of Wal-Mart’s Cheapness
Heather Mallick’s post on Canada’s Rabble.ca today sums up the fatal flaw with Wal-Mart’s business model: things are cheap, but temporary. Mallick here refers specifically to the low-quality goods Wal-Mart sells, but her principle can be drawn out to apply to Wal-Mart’s larger business model. The company’s reliance on poorly paid, underinsured employees is only as lasting as those employees’ health; the company’s dependence on communities’ tax revenue is only as stable as the town’s economy (and as we’ve seen over and over again, Wal-Mart’s very presence damages community wealth); and the company’s reliance on sweatshop manufacturing lasts only as long as those factories can fly under the radar of labor laws, human rights activists and workers’ own outrage. The bubble will at some point burst: the question is “when?”
Cheap and convenient come at a cost [Rabble (Canada)]
Last night I dreamt I went to Wal-Mart again. And I was happy there.
This worried me because the day before, I had gone to a Wal-Mart for the first time in my life, my real life, and I was badly frightened. I was checking out the store — sorry, industrial hangar exoskeleton — because developers want to build a Wal-Mart near my sort of cute, ramshackle, little-shops Toronto neighbourhood and I was there to see my future.
As it turned out, my future was my past. This Wal-Mart, a “Supercentre” the size of the Bermuda Triangle in a dire area called Scarborough, had flung me back in time to my youth.
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Friday, May 02 | 103 comments | Permalink
Site Fight Of The Week: Greater Milwaukee
The Greater Milwaukee area has had the pleasure lately of being home to several raging site fights. Two in particular, Muskego, WI, and Waukesha, WI, have been in the news lately. Both are small towns to the west of Milwaukee, an area that already has 13 Wal-Marts in a 20 mile area. Wal-Mart, which already has 85 stores in a state with the population of only 5.5 million, is clearly pushing a saturation strategy in Wisconsin.
In Muskego, Wal-Mart wants to build a 16 acre, 152,000 square foot supercenter with grocery “east of S. Moorland Road and south of W. College Ave., Wal-Mart spokeswoman Lisa Nelson said Monday. It would be just across Moorland Road from a 485,000-square-foot distribution center being built for GE Healthcare.” Al Norman runs down the Muskego fight in a Battlemart post here.
In Waukesha, Wal-Mart wants to build a 184,100 square foot behemoth on “S. West Ave. and Highway 59 on 32 acres, now the site of the closed Cretex Concrete plant.” And in Waukesha, in addition to traffic, crime and economic concerns - it seems not that the building of the new supercenter will likely endanger a local (already endangered) species of snake. Needless to say, Wal-Mart is hoping the Department of Natural Resources looks past any wildlife concerns and rubber stamps the project.
But there are many hurdles left before any construction begins on the project and hope should remain high for our Wisconsin site fighters. There’s still time to convince your town officials to consider investing in local Wisconsin businesses, instead of bringing in more Wal-Marts to ship all profits back to Bentonville, Arkansas.
TAKE ACTION NOW!
If you live in the area, write here to local officials and tell them you don’t need any new Wal-Marts.
Posted by Eric Bull on Thursday, May 01 | 17 comments | Permalink
Virtue’s Reward: Free P.R.
Virtue, as this article’s title alludes, should be its own reward. But the Financial Times’ Michael Skapinker has his doubts when applying this adage to multibillion-dollar international corporations.
What are the real motives behind Wal-Mart’s environmental program? And how can Wal-Mart’s day-to-day green effort be judged against the glacial pace environmental change?
Virtue’s reward? [Financial Times]
In Unilever’s London headquarters, Gavin Neath, the consumer goods group’s head of sustainability, takes a plastic contraption out of its cardboard box and places it on a table. It looks like a small and semi-transparent version of the vending machines that dispense drinks to office workers.
The device is called a Pureit - and it is a drinks dispensing machine of sorts. Developed by Hindustan Unilever, the company’s Indian subsidiary, the Pureit provides drinking water from any source, however polluted, purifying it with a series of meshes, parasite and pesticide traps and a germ-killing battery kit, without the need for boiling and without the use of mains electricity.
The Pureit is an illustration of how multinationals are trying to get to grips with the notion of sustainability. In the US and western Europe, the priorities are reducing the amount of packaging, cutting fuel consumption and providing for consumers who want to be sure that their purchases have been produced in an ethical or environmentally friendly fashion.
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Tuesday, April 29 | 0 comments | Permalink
From Citizens to Consumers
Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food Movement, once said:
“Economists and politicians must acknowledge that local economies are much more profound than we might think; that if the market economy did, to a certain extent, produce benefits at a given moment in time, today, thanks to its logic of expecting more and more of the earth, it is wringing disaster not only on the environment but also on human relationships. We are no longer citizens but consumers, no longer producers but people used to create consumer objects. We don’t live in a harmonious relationship with creation: we produce too much, then waste what we produce.”
Importing from overseas was once reserved for products like toys and clothing, but today food is going through this same process. As big-box retailers like Wal-Mart have accelerated globalization to a dizzying rate, we find it impossible to be really certain about what’s on our plate and where it came from.
We often forget the externalities involved with the food we eat. What is its carbon footprint? Were the farmers who produced it given a raw deal? And was it produced with chemicals that kill the land? The questions are endless but due to corporations’ - particularly Wal-Mart’s - abhorrence of transparency, the answers are limited. It’s time for us to go from consumers to citizens again, to stop treating food like another commodity and hold corporations accountable for not providing food that is good and fair.
Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World [New York Times]
Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of Europe’s peas are grown and packaged in Kenya.
In the United States, FreshDirect proclaims kiwi season has expanded to “All year!” now that Italy has become the world’s leading supplier of New Zealand’s national fruit, taking over in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.
Food has moved around the world since Europeans brought tea from China, but never at the speed or in the amounts it has over the last few years. Consumers in not only the richest nations but, increasingly, the developing world expect food whenever they crave it, with no concession to season or geography.
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Posted by Vasudha Desikan on Monday, April 28 | 0 comments | Permalink
Friday Blog Round Up: Earth Millenium Edition
RICE SHORTAGE CAUSES MASS MEDIA HYSTERIA
So maybe the rice scare wasn’t really as bad as it got chalked up to be. But the media definitely had us going there for a minute! If it wasn’t a legitimate sign of the sorry state of the world’s food supply, it’d almost be funny.
Walmart Rations Rice [Consumerist]
Wal-Mart “working with our suppliers to address this matter to ensure we are in stock, and we are asking for our members’ cooperation and patience.” It’s not as bad as it sounds, the bags are still 500 lbs each.
Wal-Mart Rations Rice [Mother Jones’ Blue Marble]
Shoot! You were planning a rice-and-beans dinner party for 100, and you thought for sure your local Wal-Mart would meet all your bulk rice needs...In light of this two-spoonfuls anecdote, Wal-Mart’s four-bag limit sounds downright decadent, but rice rationing in the U.S. means that whatever is going on with supply and demand trends is not good. Once land-o’-plenty retailers start fretting about global food shortages, you can be sure it’s time to worry.
Rice shortages in America? Unbelievable [BloggingStocks]
My guess is the businesses who buy their supplies at Sam’s Club or Costco are probably too small to meet the minimum purchase requirements of food wholesalers. Of course, they will pass on their rising costs to the consumer.
Much as we all feel tiffed at being restrained to 200-pounds of rice at a time, the Writing on the Wal highlights some larger implications of our cheap food:
the system that lets Wal-Mart customers buy cheap food makes it increasingly harder for people in lesser-developed countries to feed themselves as their food is increasingly destined for middle-class people overseas.
After the jump, rBGH-free milk, Wal-Mart’s Fortune and Rumer Willis on the beach.
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Friday, April 25 | 17 comments | Permalink
The High Price of Cheap Food
Like so many other aspects of Wal-Mart’s business model, the cheap food Wal-Mart sells comes with hidden costs. This story from the International Herald Tribune lays out how the global food trade is bad for the planet, and ultimately for the economy too. Is it Wal-Mart’s fault? Not entirely, but the retailer is definitely part of the problem and a big roadblock on the path to solution.
Putting pollution on grocery bills [International Herald Tribune]
Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Spanish Citrus Coast as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of the peas in Europe are grown and packaged in Kenya.
In the United States, FreshDirect.com proclaims kiwi season has expanded to “All year!” now that Italy has become the world’s leading supplier of the national fruit of New Zealand, taking over in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.
Food has moved around the world since Europeans discovered tea in China, but never at the speed or in the amounts it has over the last few years. Consumers in not only the richest nations but also, increasingly, the developing world expect food whenever they crave it, with no concession to season or geography.
Increasingly efficient global transport networks make it practical to bring food before it spoils from distant places where labor costs are lower. And the penetration of megamarkets in nations from China to Mexico with supply and distribution chains that gird the globe - like Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco - has accelerated the trend.
But the movable feast comes at a cost: pollution, especially carbon dioxide, from transporting the food.
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Friday, April 25 | 1 comments | Permalink
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