Wal-Mart Tries to Polish its Image
Wal-Mart makes some gains by polishing image [Baltimore Sun]
Two years ago, Wal-Mart began a counterassault on its critics, launching a re-imaging campaign to thwart those who had successfully painted an unsavory picture of the company as an employer who didn’t treat or pay its workers well, among other things.
The world’s largest retailer embarked on a public relations blitz, introducing initiatives to portray it as more environmentally friendly, more in tune with the communities where it was building and as a better employer to its workers.
The strategy has succeeded in some areas, but the company remains a target of criticism on other fronts. And as Wal-Mart still struggles to prove to others that it has implemented changes that really matter, efforts to improve its image have taken on added significance during recent months as the company loses market share to competitors.
Wal-Mart reported its weakest sales growth in almost 30 years for 2006, something that analysts and consultants said is at least partly attributed to the drumbeat of criticism about its corporate image. “For too long a period they didn’t do a great deal with image competition, and as a result they have had some serious imaging problems,” said Eugene Fram, a professor at the University of Rochester. “They’ve had to take a different tactic than they did five or 10 years ago. They have to prove to their critics that they are working at it and that they are changing.”
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Tuesday, April 24 | 7 comments | Permalink
Wal-Mart’s Growing Pains
Wal-Mart’s Midlife Crisis [BusinessWeek]
John E. Fleming, Wal-Mart’s newly appointed chief merchandising officer, is staring hard at a display of $14 women’s T-shirts in a Supercenter a few miles from the retailer’s Bentonville (Ark.) headquarters. The bright-hued stretch T’s carry Wal-Mart’s own George label and are of a quality and stylishness not commonly associated with America’s über-discounter. What vexes Fleming is that numerous sizes are out of stock in about half of the 12 colors, including frozen kiwi and black soot.
Fleming may be America’s most powerful merchant, but a timely solution is beyond him even so. Wal-Mart failed to order enough of these China-made T-shirts last year, and so they and other George-brand basics will remain in short supply in most of its 3,443 U.S. stores until 2007’s second half, depriving the retailer of tens of millions of dollars a week it sorely needs. “The issue with apparel is long lead times,” says the quietly intense Fleming, who spent 20 years at Target Corp. (TGT ) before joining Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT ) “We will get it fixed.”
For nearly five decades, Wal-Mart’s signature “everyday low prices” and their enabler—low costs—defined not only its business model but also the distinctive personality of this proud, insular company that emerged from the Ozarks backwoods to dominate retailing. Over the past year and a half, though, Wal-Mart’s growth formula has stopped working. In 2006 its U.S. division eked out a 1.9% gain in same-store sales—its worst performance ever—and this year has begun no better. By this key measure, such competitors as Target, Costco (COST ), Kroger (KR ), Safeway (SWY ), Walgreen’s (WAG ), CVS, and Best Buy (BBY ) now are all growing two to five times faster than Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart’s botched entry into cheap-chic apparel is emblematic of the quandary it faces. Is its alarming loss of momentum the temporary result of disruptions caused by transitory errors like the T-shirt screwup and by overdue improvements such as the store remodeling program launched last year? Or is Wal-Mart doing lasting damage to its low-budget franchise by trying to compete with much hipper, nimbler rivals for the middle-income dollar? Should the retailer redouble its efforts to out-Target Target, or would it be better off going back to basics?
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Posted by Media Team on Friday, April 20 | 14 comments | Permalink
Wal-Mart Tries to go Green
Wal-Mart pushes suppliers to ‘go green’ [MSNBC]
For Wal-Mart, there is a clear financial benefit to having suppliers reduce packaging or make more concentrated products — it translates into lower shipping costs and less waste, which reduces expenses. Wal-Mart says its goal is to reduce packaging by 5 percent by 2013, over 2006 levels.
Not long ago, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced plans to start judging its vast chain of suppliers not just on conventional criteria such as price, but also on a new standard — the environmental sustainability of its packaging.
Wal-Mart said the new scorecard wouldn’t be used to influence the massive retailers’ purchasing decisions until 2008. Still, the companies that fill the shelves in Wal-Mart’s stores — and in some cases depend on that business — knew better than to sit on their hands.
The result? Wal-Mart has seen more innovation in packaging in the past six months than it had seen in the previous five years, said Andy Ruben, Wal-Mart’s vice president for corporate strategy and sustainability
How did the retailing giant garner so much change so fast? Call it business as usual.
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Thursday, April 19 | 0 comments | Permalink
Where Wal-Mart Goes, Others Will Follow
USA Today reports that Home Depot is increasing the number and range of environmentally-friendly products sold in its stores. The article cites Wal-Mart’s recent environemental initiatives for Home Depot’s changes, implying that where Wal-Mart goes, others will follow. Imagine the environmental impact, then, if Wal-Mart were to truly transform not only its product offerings but also its stores, transportation methods, production processes AND took other big box stores with it.
More retailers go for green — the eco kind [USA Today]
Home Depot announced plans Tuesday to offer more environmentally friendly products and make it easier for consumers to find them.
Included are more than 2,500 items ranging from all-natural insect repellents to front-load washing machines. Products that meet the criteria will be tagged Eco Options to make them easier to find.
“We don’t have people banging on our doors, saying, ‘Give us your green products,’ “ says Ron Jarvis, Home Depot (HD) vice president of environmental innovation. “But it’s the right time to educate consumers that their shopping habits can have an impact and that they can make a difference without going out of their way.”
The move by the country’s second-largest retailer comes after the largest, Wal-Mart, kicked off an environmental initiative last fall that favors suppliers who restrict carbon emissions and embrace sustainability.
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Wednesday, April 18 | 1 comments | Permalink
Action Alert: Ask Wal-Mart to Adopt Humane Policies
The American Protection Institute has issued an action alert, urging consumers to ask Wal-Mart to treat livestock-for-slaughter humanely.
Ask Wal-Mart to Adopt Humane Policies
Recently the Animal Protection Institute contacted Wal-Mart asking it to take a stand against the long distance transport of farmed animals destined for slaughter.
Specifically, API asked the retail giant to incorporate animal transport limits into its stores’ meat purchasing polices by not carrying any meat from animals transported more than 8 hours. At the very least, we asked that it use in-store signage to distinguish which meat products did not require the long distance transport of farmed animals.
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Thursday, April 05 | 6 comments | Permalink
Wal-Mart’s Opposition to Country of Origin Labeling--and what we are doing about it
Wal-Mart has long been opposed to mandatory Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) for food products--the law which was passed and requires grocers to inform consumers where the meat they buy for their families is coming from. For a company that proclaims to help people “live better lives”, isn’t this a bit hypocritical? That’s why we’re running radio ads to inform the public about Wal-Mart once again saying one thing while doing another.
Wal-Mart used to proclaim to be an All-American company, one which sourced products from the United States. Now, not only do they fail to source meat from American farmers, the company won’t even tell shoppers where the products they are eating come from. Wal-Mart should drop its opposition to Country of Origin Labeling, tell consumers where the meat they are buying is raised, and use its market power to be a force for positive change. Until they do, Wal-Mart is guilty of saying one thing and doing another--this time at the expense of consumers and American family farmers.
Listen to the ad and check out our page on Wal-Mart’s opposition to COOL.
Posted by Enviro. Team on Wednesday, April 04 | 4 comments | Permalink
The Impossibility of a “Green” Wal-Mart
From Grist.com:
Keep Your Eyes on the Size
The impossibility of a green Wal-Mart
With its recent flurry of green initiatives, Wal-Mart has won the embrace of several prominent environmental groups. “If they do even half what they say they want to do, it will make a huge difference for the planet,” said Ashok Gupta of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Environmental Defense, meanwhile, has deemed Wal-Mart’s actions momentous enough to warrant opening an office near the retailer’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. “If [we] can nudge Wal-Mart in the right direction on the environment, we can have a huge impact,” said the organization’s executive vice president, David Yarnold.
Wal-Mart’s eco-commitments are not without substance. The two most significant are a pledge to make its stores 20 percent more energy efficient by 2013, which will cut annual electricity use by 3.5 million megawatt-hours, and a plan to double the fuel economy of its trucks by 2015, which will save 60 million gallons of diesel fuel a year.
Acting with unusual transparency, Wal-Mart has even published a benchmark calculation of its carbon footprint [Excel]. The company estimates that its U.S. operations were responsible for 15.3 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2005. About three-quarters of this pollution came from the electricity generated to power its stores.
This cannot be dismissed as greenwashing. It’s actually far more dangerous than that. Wal-Mart’s initiatives have just enough meat to have distracted much of the environmental movement, along with most journalists and many ordinary people, from the fundamental fact that, as a system of distributing goods to people, big-box retailing is as intrinsically unsustainable as clear-cut logging is as a method of harvesting trees.
Here’s the key issue. Wal-Mart’s carbon estimate omits a massive source of CO2 that is inherent to its operations and amounts to more than all of its other greenhouse-gas emissions combined: the CO2 produced by customers driving to its stores.
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Thursday, March 29 | 12 comments | Permalink
Revisiting the Wal-Mart Effect: Sustainability, Detergent and Retail
Wal-Mart’s effect on the retail industry and suppliers remains despite slowing growth in same store sales. However, Wal-Mart can change industry habits with both positive and negative consequences. There is little question of how Wal-Mart can shift entire industries.
While Wal-Mart’s supposed green policy, Sustainability 360, is a bit hollow without a comprehensive change in company development policies, the Wal-Mart effect has been present here as well. While much attention is drawn to the energy conservation elements Wal-Marts greening campaign, it is with detergents where the Wal-Mart effect is having the largest impact.
For example, the entire detergent industry is being forced to green under the auspices of Wal-Mart attempting to reduce the amount of toxics in its stores. There are two particular instances where the effect is especially visible. One is with regards to a particular product, and the other is with the industry as a whole.
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Posted by Research Team on Thursday, March 08 | 26 comments | Permalink
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