Wal-Mart Watch Calls on Wal-Mart Board to Help Change Retail Giant
In a letter delivered to Wal-Mart’s Board of Directors, Wal-Mart Watch and more than 7,500 supporters call on the board to make help changes at the company. Wal-Mart’s 14 directors will each receive a packet today that includes the letters signed by 7,526 Wal-Mart Watch supporters, and a DVD compilation of personal appeals to board members. From thousands of comments sent in by Wal-Mart Watch supporters, the letter highlights nine individuals who voiced their concerns over Wal-Mart’s unfair labor practices, prohibitive health care plan and impact on local communities.
As Kristen from Upland, California put it:
“Wal-Mart can be about so much more than making money. It can be about leading the industry in fair labor practices. It can be about leading the field in environmentally sensitive causes. To many that I know Wal-Mart has become a symbol of all that disturbs them about big business. You CAN change their minds and get them back into your stores by showing the kind of compassion for the world around you that wins the hearts and minds of your customers.”
THANK YOU to all the dedicated supporters who signed the letter: your help is fundamental in pressuring Wal-Mart to change its practices and behave as a responsible corporate citizen.
Click here to read the letter in its entirety. >>
Click here to watch the video sent to the Board of Directors. >>
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Wednesday, May 30 | 0 comments | Permalink
Wal-Mart and the Poverty Business
The cover article in this week’s issue of BusinessWeek examines businesses that profit off poverty, and Wal-Mart is among the worst of these. Wal-Mart is one of the biggest companies in the poverty business: poverty is essential to their business model. Wal-Mart relies heavily on targeting poor consumers, often selling poor quality merchandize which may be cheaper, but in reality reflects a significantly lower quality product.
Aside from selling cheap merchandise that must be frequently replaced (eventually costing more - both environmentally AND economically - than more durable products) Wal-Mart has also been contemplating entering the pay-day loan business, which many poverty advocates call “legalized loan sharking”. Wal-Mart does have a desire to enter the finance sector with loans and other financial services, but the types of services they would offer lean more towards the predatory financial services involving high interest loans.
Wal-Mart has also offered space for third party pay-day loan businesses, most notably Ace Payday Loans, which was the subject of a final judgment brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission on the basis of fraud. Having pay-day lending services readily available inside Wal-Mart stores means Wal-Mart is responsible for the exploitation of its core client base, as well as its own employees. Between paying assocaites low wages, selling low-quality merchandise, and opening its in-store space to pay-day lenders, Wal-Mart is without question one of the largest players in the poverty business.
Roxanne Tsosie decided in late 2005 to pull her life together. She was 28 years old and still lived in her mother’s two-room apartment in a poor neighborhood in southeast Albuquerque known as the War Zone. She survived mostly on food stamps and welfare. The Tsosies are Navajo, and Roxanne’s mother wanted to move back to a reservation in western New Mexico where the family has a dilapidated house lacking electricity and running water. Roxanne, unmarried and with four children of her own, could make out her future, and she didn’t like what she saw.
With only a high school diploma, her employment options were limited. She landed a job as a home-health-care aide for the elderly and infirm. It paid $15,000 a year and required that she have a car to make her rounds of Albuquerque and its rambling desert suburbs. A friend told her about a used-car place called J.D. Byrider Systems Inc.
The bright orange car lot stands out amid a jumble of payday lenders, pawn shops, and rent-to-own electronics stores on Central Avenue in the War Zone. Signs in Spanish along the street promise “Financiamos a Todos"—Financing for All. On the same day she walked into Byrider, Tsosie drove off, jubilant, in a 1999 Saturn subcompact she bought entirely on credit. “I was starting to think I could actually get things I wanted,” she says.
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Friday, May 18 | 49 comments | Permalink
Youth Group Raises Awareness for Sweatshop Labor
Festive event reminds attendees that sweatshops mistreat workers [St. Louis Review]
The topic was a natural tie-in, though not a typical approach for such a festive occasion. Yet, St. Matthew the Apostle Parish’s youth ministry pulled it off.
The youth ministry sponsored a fund-raising dinner and fashion show April 21 at the parish’s Stanley and Clayton Rice Family center. The nontypical approach was a finale that appealed to the partygoers’ consciences by highlighting garment sweatshops and how people can pressure companies to change policies to protect workers.
“It gave people good information about these companies and what they’re doing,” said Henry Graham, who attended the event.
Melynie Blackshear, director of youth ministry at the parish, said the focus was on underpaid and overworked people who are forced to make a living under horrible conditions. “The social concerns that surround this particular issue are of major concern within our group,” she said.
Companies try to make garments as cheaply as possible so they can maximize profits, she noted. “We wanted to bring more awareness to the community.”
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Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Monday, May 07 | 0 comments | Permalink
Wal-Mart Turns to Infomericals to Tune In Workers
Wal-Mart infomercials seek to counter critics’ charges [Arkansas Democrat-Gazette]
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., facing a constant barrage of criticism from union-funded political campaigns, has turned to infomercials as its latest public-image tool.
The first half-hour show, which aired Saturday morning on the USA network, highlights the volunteer efforts, patriotism and talents of its employees across the country.
A spokesman for the Bentonville-based retailer, the world’s largest, said the target audience is the company’s own workers.
“They’re not ads,” said Nick Agarwal, vice president of corporate communications, who declined to talk about the cost of the effort.
“It’s just a way for us to share some of the stories that our associates bring in every day,” he said. “It’s part of the culture to share what we do, who we are.”
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Posted by Web Team on Thursday, May 03 | 9 comments | Permalink
Marketing to Muslims
Rewriting the Ad Rules for Muslim-Americans [New York Times]
For years, few advertisers in the United States have dared to reach out to Muslims.
Selling to Islam Either they did not see much potential for sales or they feared a political backlash. And there were practical reasons: American Muslims come from so many ethnic backgrounds that their only common ground is their religion, a subject most marketers avoid.
That is beginning to change. Consumer companies and advertising executives are focusing on ways to use the cultural aspects of the Muslim religion to help sell their products.
Grocers and consumer product companies are considering ways to adapt their goods to Muslim rules, which forbid among other things, gelatin and pig fat, which is often used in cosmetics and cleaning products. Retailers are looking into providing more conservative skirts, even during the summer months, and mainstream advertisers are planning to place some commercials on the satellite channels that Muslims often watch.
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Posted by Media Team on Monday, April 30 | 0 comments | Permalink
ICCR Subject of Wal-Mart Spying
Foundation exec to head Interfaith Center [New Haven Register]
An official of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven with the soul of an activist has been named to lead the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.
Laura Berry, 49, is the first lay director of the center, a New York-based consortium of 275 faith-based groups that use their combined investing clout to pressure corporations to increase their social responsibility...The ICCR includes religious denominations, pension funds, health-care corporations, foundations and dioceses with $110 billion in combined portfolios.
Among its causes has been a charge that Wal-Mart Stores Inc. illegally spied on shareholders. Wal-Mart has denied any surveillance took place but the ICCR has demanded a formal apology and copies of any material collected on the groups’ members.
New York City’s comptroller has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department to investigate Wal-Mart’s actions.
Click here to read ICCR’s press release on Wal-Mart’s corporate surveillance.
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Monday, April 23 | 0 comments | Permalink
Dancing With Consumerism
Dancing with Consumerism [Christianity Today]
Shane Hipps on moving toward, against, and away from the culture.
Url: You moved from a career in advertising to pastor a Mennonite church. Is that reflective of a generation that’s reacting against consumerism? Do you see a trend of younger people preferring smaller, less market driven, ministries?
Hipps: We are a consumer culture. I am a consumer. I understand that it’s insidious and dangerous, but I am still a consumer. That’s just how we’re shaped. That’s the cultural currency. And so mega-churches will thrive. They will always thrive. The emerging church used to say mega-churches are going away. They’re not going away. They’re predicated on the metaphor of consumerism. And as long as consumerism is the dominant mode of our culture mega-churches will always thrive. Some are saying that this next generation hates that. They don’t. They love it.
So if the younger generation is not reacting against consumer church, what are they reacting to?
I make a distinction between three different kinds of consumerism. One is mainstream consumerism; the dominant hegemony that happens in our culture. Mainstream consumerism is mega. Walmart exemplifies this kind of consumerism, as does the mega-church. Boomer consumerism is mainstream consumerism.
Then you have counter consumerism, which is savviness. They are aware that Walmart and [Microsoft] Windows are trying to dominate, and they resist just like they resist mega-churches. But the odd thing is they’re no less consumers. They’re just counter consumers. A counter consumer buys Apple. It is absolutely consumer driven. They are consuming an identity that says we’re different; an alternative from the rest of you.
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Posted by Media Team on Monday, April 23 | 0 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
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