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The Shaw’s supermarket on Whalley Avenue in New Haven, Connecticut is closing down. It’s one of 18 stores that are being sold off by Shaw’s owner, SuperValu.

Most of the Shaw’s stores are being bought up by three other New England grocery chains, including Stop & Shop, ShopRite and PriceRite. The Shaw’s in New Haven doesn’t have a buyer yet. Wal-Mart is listed by Supermarket News as the largest grocery chain in the world. In America, Wal-Mart’s market share is in the mid 20% range for dry groceries, dairy and frozen foods.

Supervalu is listed as number 15 on the worldwide grocers list. Supervalu describes itself as a “mix of owned, licensed, franchised and affiliated stores, (which) serves millions of families from coast-to-coast.” The retail banners that Supervalu operates include: Acme, Albertsons, Bigg’s Bristol Farms, Cub, Farm Fresh, Hornbackaer, Jewe-Osco, Shaw’s/Star Market, Shop ‘N Save, and Shoppers. The company also controls the discount grocery chain Save-A-Lot.

The Shaw’s lineage goes back to 1860, when George C. Shaw opened his first store in Portland, Maine. A few years later, another native New Englander, Maynard A. Davis, opened his first Public Markets in Brockton and New Bedford, Massachusetts. These two stores merged, and today the Shaw’s/Star Market chain has over 30,000 workers in the six New England states---soon to be five states. The 18 stores being shut down represent around 9% of the 194 stores under the Shaw’s banner.

Supervalu as a conglomerate controls roughly 4,300 retail outlets in the United States. “We bring our national scale and local hyper-relevance to thousands of consumers, helping to make us ‘America’s Neighborhood Grocer.’” But in Connecticut, Supervalu is leaving the neighborhood.

According to the Hartford Courant’s account of the Shaw’s meltdown this week, the company had a 15 year track record in Connecticut, but had come under increasing pressures from competitors like Wal-Mart and Whole Foods. Today Wal-Mart has only 5 superstores in Connecticut, and 28 discount stores. But in 1994, just as Shaw’s was preparing to enter Connecticut, the state had only 2 Wal-Mart discount stores, and no supercenters.

A spokesman for Supermarket News told the Hartford Courant that Shaw’s had failed to differentiate itself. “They’ve had an inconsistent identity with the shopper. In order for a conventional supermarket to stand out, they have to be special, whether that’s local flavor or product or service offerings that are unique.” At their point of highest penetration, Shaw’s had 26 stores in Connecticut, but over the years they shut down 8 stores. A spokesman for Supervalu told the Courant, “While these decisions are always difficult given the impact on associates and customers, they ultimately allow us to operate more efficiently and effectively within a highly competitive retail environment.” That’s of little consolation to the workers who are losing their jobs in the middle of this recession.

What you can do: Many of the former Shaw’s stores will be unionized under their new owners. Brian Petronella, a spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) local 371, said 5 of the ShopRites will be represented by the UFCW. Local 371 will also represent the new Stop & Shop stores. The UFCW extended a hand to the Shaw’s workers who will work at ShopRite stores that are not unionized. “We will try to help those people get jobs at union locations,” Petronella told the Courant.

The demise of Shaw’s in Connecticut is just a continuation of the shift in market share towards the largest grocer in the world: Wal-Mart. In 2003, a study by Retail Forward, entitled “Wal-Mart Food: Big, and Getting Bigger,” pointed out that just ten or fifteen years ago, “Wal-Mart was barely on the food radar screen. Virtually overnight, the retailing behemoth has become the dominant grocer in America.” In 2003, Wal-Mart sales were bigger than the combined sales of the top ten U.S. supermarket retailers. “Wal-Mart has the proven ability to quickly blanket a market with its multi-format approach,” said Retail Forward, “to become a dominant---if not leading—market share player in rapid fashion, wreaking havoc for the incumbents.”

The latest incumbent is Shaw’s supermarkets. Seven years ago, Retail Forward predicted that “for every Wal-Mart supercenter that opens in the next five years, two supermarkets will close their doors. As a result, the supermarket industry is projected to lose 2,000 more stores over the next five years.” The consultant concluded that grocery stores can survive, but “the key is to be what Wal-Mart is not.” The analysts will say that Shaw’s failed to find a “distinct positioning strategy” that set them apart. But the fact is, the Connecticut market is saturated with grocery stores, and most of Wal-Mart’s stores still do not carry a full line of groceries--so the problem will get worse if Connecticut communities let Wal-Mart build more superstores.

Readers are urged to copy this article and send it to their local city or town officials with the following note: “When Wal-Mart files a proposal for a superstore in our town, please learn from the lesson of Shaw’s supermarkets, and understand that a Wal-Mart opening merely leads to to other stores closing. It does not happen overnight---but it happens---and when it does, people lose their jobs, and no added value comes to the local economy. It’s just an unproductive game of retail musical chairs, and shifting market share. Wal-Mart sales comes largely from other cash registers. If you understand that, then you behave differently when the superstore comes knocking on your door.”

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Earlier today, we gave you a rundown on Internet reaction to Wal-Mart’s support of employee-mandated health care. Well, now yet another voice has weighed in, and this one has a fairly large pedestal.

In its Opinions section, The Wall Street Journal writes that by throwing its support behind the controversial measure, Wal-Mart may have bought itself some protection by selling out its competitors in the business community.

The employer-mandate endorsement falls into the same self-interest department. A boost in the minimum wage helps Wal-Mart because most of its workers already earn well over the wage floor, and it hurts smaller, less-profitable competitors that can’t afford to pay more. On health care, an employer mandate will also reduce the margins of their rivals. This is especially true for businesses of a slightly smaller size that cannot insure on the same scale or currently don’t reach the 55% of the 1.4 million Wal-Mart employees who are insured through the company. (Another 40% or so are covered by spouses or the likes of Medicaid.)

The piece also offers more speculation as to additional motives for the move:

Businesses are going along with this and other gambits in part because of a prisoners’ dilemma: They’re terrified of being shut out of Democratic health negotiations lest they get stuck with the bill. Wal-Mart may also be trying to pre-empt an employer mandate the Senate is considering that would target companies with predominantly low-wage, low-skilled or entry-level work forces.

Everyday Low Politics [The Wall Street Journal]

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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.

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WAL-MART NOT GIVING UP ON CHICAGO
    

• Wal-Mart Not Giving Up on South Side [Chicago Public Radio]
  Chicago got its first Wal-Mart store, on the city’s West Side, just three years ago. Unions and grassroots activists fought the controversial big box coming within city limits.
  

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What do Wal-Mart and the 18th Century British East India Company (BEIC) have in common? According to Huffington Post contributor Thom Hartmann, they both were the corporate Goliaths of their time.

While today’s “Tea Party” protesters are expressing a vague “taxes are bad” message, the protesters of 1773, like those opposing Wal-Mart today, stood up against the BEIC’s monopoly on an industry. In this case it was their control of the tea trade, which squeezed small colonial tea shops to the brink of bankruptcy. Indeed, as Hartmann writes, the colonists’ subsequent defiance of Britain’s and the BEIC’s economic stranglehold through the Boston Tea Party was a key turning point on the road to revolution and the formation of a new United States of America. Today, as then, America is facing the consequences of Wal-Mart’s and other corporations’ power run amok.

It’s a great piece - read the whole thing:

Thom Hartmann: The Real Boston Tea Party was Against the Wal-Mart of the 1770s [Huffington Post]

CNBC Correspondent Rick Santelli called for a “Chicago Tea Party” on Feb 19th in protesting President Obama’s plan to help homeowners in trouble. Santelli’s call was answered by the right-wing group Freedomworks, which funds campaigns promoting big business interests, and is the opposite of what the real Boston Tea Party was. FreedomWorks was funded in 2004 by Dick Army (former Republican House Majority leader & lobbyist); consolidated Citizens for a Sound Economy, funded by the Koch family; and Empower America, a lobbying firm, that had fought against healthcare and minimum-wage efforts while hailing deregulation.

Anti-tax “tea party” organizers are delivering one million tea bags to a Washington, D.C., park Wednesday morning - to promote protests across the country by people they say are fed up with high taxes and excess spending.

The real Boston Tea Party was a protest against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation then in existence. This corporate tax cut threatened to decimate small Colonial businesses by helping the BEIC pull a Wal-Mart against small entrepreneurial tea shops, and individuals began a revolt that kicked-off a series of events that ended in the creation of The United States of America.

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On the surface, it appears Wal-Mart was quite charitable in 2008: according to an Associated Press story in today’s news, the retailer gave away $423 million last year. But for a company Wal-Mart’s size, this is chump change. A better number, researched by Forbes, is giving as a percentage of a company’s operating revenue (essentially, earnings before taxes and interest payments). By this measure, Wal-Mart ranks after relatively smaller entities such as Kroger, which according to our calculations from the company’s website, gave a whopping 6.7% of its 2006 operating income in total charitable donations, including the value of in-kind donations to food banks and other community outreach efforts. The Forbes article, for its part, ranks Kroger number one in charitable giving, but lists them giving away only 57 million out of a 2006 operating income of $3.3 billion, or 1.7%. This lower number, which counts only the company’s cash donations, misses the true value of Kroger’s charitable activity. For Wal-Mart we have more recent numbers: $423 million amounts to 1.9% of the company’s 2008 operating income given in cash donations.

We challenge Wal-Mart to be more transparent about where they disperse these funds. More importantly, we challenge it to support the American economy in a much more durable way by paying its employees better wages. Wal-Mart frequently attempts to substitute charity for real investment in a community; the company trickles out feel-good charitable donation stories—a theater here, a park there—to maximize the positive spin it receives in the media. The company is also known for using charity to manipulate public opinion, especially in the Chicago area where it recently gave money to run a children’s theater program in Waukegan, on Chicago’s north side.  While Wal-Mart’s charity in a general sense is not to be criticized, obvious attempts to influence public opinion in areas where the retailer wants to expand are certainly suspect. Most importantly, they are no substitute for paying a living wage and offering adequate and affordable health benefits. Instead of patronizing communities, Wal-Mart should help empower workers to help themselves.

The Associated Press story is here.

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A push to get rid of wilted lettuce and rotten tomatoes is paying off for Wal-Mart, despite a grocery business that continues to score low in customer satisfaction. From Bloomberg:

Wal-Mart plans to advertise its produce in coming months to win over more customers after efforts to tidy displays, buy food locally and automate purchasing, executives said in interviews last month at the company’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Groceries account for more than 40 percent of sales at Wal-Mart’s U.S. stores and have outpaced the growth of most other products in the past year.

Despite the fact that Wal-Mart has undoubtedly prospered during our country’s economic...ummm...struggles, the perception of the quality being sold there remains low. In fact, on the American Customer Satisfaction Index posted by the University of Michigan, Wal-Mart consistently ranks at the bottom.

Customer ratings on meat and produce have trailed the rest of the store, said Bill Simon, Wal-Mart’s chief operating officer for U.S. stores...In terms of customer satisfaction, Wal-Mart’s grocery business ranked worst in the fourth quarter compared with six major supermarket chains, according to the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index.

What this doesn’t bode well for is Wal-Mart maintaining its market share once the economy turns around. Indeed, Wal-Mart sits at a 68% satisfaction rate, 8 points behind the average supermarket score and over 4 points behind Wal-Mart’s own score from a year ago. If that continues, could an uptick in economic fortunes see shoppers returning to their old grocery shopping habits?

So, are we happy that Wal-Mart is trying to upgrade the quality of its produce? Or perhaps the better question to ask is, should we be concerned about the reasons why Wal-Mart needs to upgrade its produce in the first place? Couldn’t they have tried to avoid sub-standard produce right from the beginning? Beverly Crisp, a shopper interviewed by Bloomberg, was surprised on her most recent shopping trip that Wal-Mart’s grocery aisles weren’t “the mess” they had been previously - if that’s the general consensus among shoppers, Wal-Mart is going to need more than just new broccoli to fix its image.

Wal-Mart’s Push for Fresher Broccoli Boosts Revenue [Bloomberg]

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A move that many analysts have anticipated for a long time is one step closer to reality: Wal-Mart is moving into Russia. The retailer announced that it has joined the Russian Association of Retail Trade Companies (AKORT) and registered a legal entity in the country, Wal-Mart Eastern Europe Holdings. In January 2007, Wal-Mart had hinted at expansion and had begun talks with X5, Russia’s largest food retailer. The Russian market represents an awesome growth opportunity for the company: GDP grew at 8.1% in 2007 and Russian consumers have shown a preference for toys from Wal-Mart’s number one supplier country, China, with imports valued at hundreds of millions of dollars in 2006. Yet as of 2008 only about a third of Russia’s retail sales came through groceries and superstores, with independent markets and small businesses constituting the majority of the sector. Additionally, Wal-Mart’s European competitors Carrefour and Tesco have shown an interest in moving into Russia; Carrefour is already part of AKORT. As elsewhere, Wal-Mart may be trying to beat them to the punch.

Wal-Mart Moves Closer to Russia [Reuters via Moscow Times]

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, has registered a legal entity in Russia and joined a local retailers’ organization, the latest in a series of moves indicating its interest in expanding into the country.

The company registered a subsidiary under the name WM Eastern Europe Holdings and joined the Russian Association of Retail Trade Companies, or AKORT, which includes the 28 largest commercial organizations in the country.

“Wal-Mart is working on the Russian market,” Ilya Belonovsky, the executive director of the 28-member industry group said Dec. 29. He declined to elaborate.

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Wal-Mart has built a reputation cold-hearted censorship - whether it’s record albums or movies, the retailer has massive control over the content of the media it sells.

Now it seems like the practice has spread to newspapers: employees at Wal-Mart’s British stores were ordered to remove competitors’ fliers from the daily papers, and cover up certain papers when competitors ran front page ads. Unlike in the U.S., Wal-Mart is only the second largest retailer in the U.K., and has been fiercely battling other retailers for months. The employees eventually pushed back against the practice, refusing to comply with such underhanded tactics. If only everyone along the Wal-Mart supply chain had such gumption.

Asda staff expose mangers’ dirty tricks to sabotage Tesco adverts [Sunday Mail (U.K.)]

ASDA staff were ordered to take Tesco flyers out of newspapers and dump them in bins as supermarket price wars turned nasty.

But staff blew the whistle as they felt too ashamed to carry out the sneaky tactics. Red-faced Asda bosses yesterday admitted thousands of leaflets were binned at an Edinburgh store.

Workers there claimed bosses even turned down their request to put the promos in a recycling bin.

A member of staff at the capital’s Chesser store said: “One of the people in the cigarette kiosk had to take all the inserts out and bin them. He was really hacked off about it.

“The guy asked the manager if they could at least take the leaflets to the recycling bin but were told not to.”

When Tesco took out a full frontpage advert on a local paper, staff were told to cover the issue up.

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One of Wal-Mart’s largest suppliers - consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble - announced today that they will be raising prices as much as 16 percent. Despite Wal-Mart’s recent incentives forcing suppliers to cut back on packaging, P&G cited increasing costs for plastic and paper as one of the main reasons for the price increase. The big question here is: Will Wal-Mart accept the higher prices? The company is notorious for bullying suppliers in to lowering prices, but Procter & Gamble is so big it might just be able to stand up to the retailer. Who do you think will win this battle? Will Wal-Mart accept P&G’s higher expenses, and if so, what does this mean for Wal-Mart’s purchasing policy? Submit your thoughts in the comments.

Procter & Gamble to Increase Prices as Much as 16% [Bloomberg News]

Procter & Gamble Co., the maker of Tide laundry detergent and Head & Shoulders shampoo, will raise prices as much as 16 percent because of higher costs for plastic, energy and paper.

The increases are the Cincinnati-based company’s steepest in at least 18 months. Procter & Gamble is betting that customers will continue to buy its Gillette shaving cream and Ivory soap rather than switching to store brands with lower prices promoted by Kroger Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

“Consumers are conditioned to expect that price increases are here to stay, and they are going to see that across the board,’’ said Peter Sorrentino, who helps oversee assets of $16.7 billion at Huntington Asset Advisors. “They will try the store brands, but if the product performance isn’t there, they will switch back.’’ His Cincinnati-based firm owns P&G shares.

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Competition in China’s global marketplace is heating up even more.  With South Korean Lotte entering the Chinese market through the acquisition of CTA Makro, Wal-Mart and Carrefour will face even greater pressure to distinguish themselves and appeal to Chinese customers.

Unfortunately for Wal-Mart, which has faced an unusual amount of brutally honest attention in Chinese media, and Carrefour, which has gained an infamy for being French, Lotte could be poised for success.  In addition to Lotte’s proposed growth of 300 stores over the next ten years (Wal-Mart and Carrefour both managed about 100 stores in their initial ten years), Lotte has previous experience in China selling food products.

More from Reuters:

Lotte to open 300 stores in China in 10 years

SHANGHAI, June 11 (Reuters) - Lotte Shopping Co (023530.KS: Quote, Profile, Research), South Korea’s biggest department store operator, said on Wednesday it plans to open 300 hypermarkets in China in the next decade, as it competes for market share with Wal-Mart (WMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Carrefour (CARR.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) in the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

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This story from Utne Reader explains why big box retailers won’t take over the economy - and it’s NOT because their prices are too low. Rather, the author explains, people’s tastes are too varied for any big box store to truly win the retail competition. The story cites Wal-Mart’s foray in Germany as one example of this weakness:

The inability of many big-box retailers to adapt to local tastes and their failure to anticipate technological market shifts has been their Achilles heel. When Wal-Mart was forced to shutter its German stores, a mystified company spokeswoman told a reporter, “We thought everyone around the world loved Wal-Mart.” (The International Herald Tribune quoted a baffled Wal-Mart shopper in South Korea, where the company has also abandoned operations, wondering, “Why would you buy a box of shampoo bottles?”) The chain had made the mistake of assuming that full-spectrum retail dominance is achieved by virtue of size alone, without regard to cultural and regional difference.

Author Michael C. Moynihan rightly points out that the life and death cycles of big retail chains have been evolving for over 100 years. As major retailers come and go, so too wane opposition groups and citizens brigades.

[S]tores like Wal-Mart will always be with us, just as they were when they were called Woolworth’s or A&P. If Sam Walton’s creation disappears, it will doubtless be replaced by a more clever, more modern adaptation of the business model he popularized.

Moynihan focuses on the aesthetic and feeling-based reasons for shopping locally, but fails to examine the potential national chains have for changing the dynamics of U.S. working life. Every time Woolworth’s or GM improved their business practices, the entire U.S. economy was lifted towards better working conditions and better pay. As Moynihan points out, Wal-Mart is only the latest in a long line of national retail chains, and like its predecessors it has the ability to change the economy for the better.

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Workers at DC-area supermarkets Safeway and Giant are finding it harder than ever to negotiate with their employers. An article in today’s Washington Post chronicles the difficulties unionized DC-area grocery workers face in recent contract negotiations. While they work to gain better health care coverage, their efforts are made more difficult by pressure from non-unionized grocers like Wal-Mart. Even though Wal-Mart’s not a big player in the DC area’s grocery market, supermarket chains are increasingly competing on a national level as the industry consolidates. Unionized grocery chains are having a harder and harder time competing with Wal-Mart, whose low wages and paltry employee health care help it remain the country’s largest grocer.

As Deadline Nears, Grocery Talks Focus on Wages [Washington Post]

While jobs in the heavily unionized grocery industry were once considered a reliable pathway to the middle class, nimble nonunion competitors such as Wal-Mart and Wegman’s have prompted retailers to find ways to cut labor costs. Among the chief issues at the bargaining table are wage increases and the spiraling cost of health care—and who should be responsible for paying it.

Leaders of UFCW locals 400 and 27, which represent about 23,000 members in the Baltimore and Washington regions, said Friday that no progress had been made in the month-long talks. The lead negotiator for Safeway and Giant, Harry Burton, declined to comment. Bargaining is scheduled to resume tomorrow, and the deadline for a deal is Saturday, when the current four-year contract expires. Workers are slated to vote on the contract April 1.

“The companies continue not to make any significant proposals on issues of major concern for our members,” reads a post on the Web site of Local 400. “Please be prepared to fight for what you and your families deserve.”

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Wal-Mart has been struggling with its U.K. stores for some time, facing both stiff competition in the country and strict development rules that prohibit the company’s normal expansion practices. It seems that Wal-Mart’s problems in Britain are even worse than they’ve appeared: the company considered leaving the U.K. last year. The news has analysts questioning the stability of Wal-Mart’s U.K. branch, and is drawing comparisons to the company’s failures in Germany and South Korea. Asda is one of the major components of Wal-Mart’s international expansion plan, an increasingly important part of the company’s growth strategy as U.S. expansion slows.

Could Asda be kicked out of Wal-Mart? [Telegraph (U.K.)]

When Wal-Mart swooped to buy Asda in 1999 for £6.7bn analysts predicted that the arrival of the world’s largest retailer would change the UK high street forever - sparking a savage price war and a wave of mega mergers.

But the doom-laden predictions of 1999 have proved wide of the mark. The combination of intense competition and planning restrictions have frustrated Wal-Mart’s ambitious plans for Asda and the UK.

In fact, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal that Wal-Mart president Lee Scott became so dismayed at the failure to crack the UK market and the constraints on future growth that last year he ordered a strategic review that could have seen Wal-Mart float a minority stake in Asda or even pull out of the UK entirely.

According to sources the strategic review has - for now - been shelved. Asda refused to comment.

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Costco’s sales rose 7% in February while Wal-Mart’s sales, (which were expected to reap the rewards of our economic troubles, didn’t rise half so much.

Big box discounters like Wal-Mart or Target also offer low prices, but Yared says warehouse stores have an advantage. A Costco warehouse might have only 10% of the number of items that a Wal-Mart store sells. Thus, Yared says, Costco is “laser-beam focused” on top sellers, while Wal-Mart has “a lot of merchandise that just isn’t selling.”

Also, requiring customers to buy a membership card seems to boost customer loyalty and spur extra spending. Some attribute the extra spending to clubs’ lower prices, but recent research by Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Leonard Lee of Columbia Business School suggests shoppers’ motivations might be more irrational. “The presence of membership feeds can lead consumers to infer a ‘fee [to] savings’ link, spurring them to increase their spending independent of the actual savings afforded by such clubs,” Norton and Lee wrote recently.

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An article from the Northwest Arkansas Morning News takes a closer look at Wal-Mart’s greening efforts, and while the piece stops short of calling the company’s initiatives “greenwashing” per se, it says most of Wal-Mart’s suppliers aren’t really sure what this whole sustainability concept is all about. Most of them are scrambling to stay on the company’s good side, but comprehensive sustainability efforts can take months or years to implement. And while Wal-Mart has been quick to certify some suppliers as “green,” the notation doesn’t have much basis in reality. So you decide: how genuine are Wal-Mart’s sustainability efforts?

Suppliers warned against greenwashing [NW Arkansas Morning News]

Consumers are seeing many products in stores with claims of being green. Compact this, concentrated that. This is green, that is ecofriendly.

Yes, caring about the environment is more popular than ever. Consumers want environmentally friendly products, and businesses want to give it to them.

Everyone wins, right? Not so fast.

The rush to capitalize on a growing interest in going green has presented real problems to suppliers and consumers. From defining what green means to what’s meaningful to consumers, a simple idea can get pretty complex.

And these days, there’s a lot of pressure on suppliers to go back to the drawing board with reduced packaging, innovative new products, elimination of wasteful materials and reductions in energy use at every step along the way.

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Click below to vote in Consumerist’s Worst Company of the Year. Start your office pool on who will win! NOTE: We’d recommend scrolling down to the “W’s.”

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The so-called underdog of the computer world, Apple, is poised to overtake Wal-Mart in music sales sometime this year.

The NPD Group issued a report Tuesday that said Apple had outpaced Best Buy and Target to become the No. 2 U.S. music retailer. Unless the downward trend in CD sales suddenly reverses, Apple will be No. 1, said Russ Crupnick, the NPD Group’s president of Music.

“Digital sales were up close to 50 percent and CD sales were down 20 percent last year,” Crupnick said. “Even at half that growth rate in digital sales, Apple will in all likelihood catch Wal-Mart this year.”

Anybody in their teens or early 20s is going to ask, “So what else is new?” To them, digital downloads has been part of their lives for years. It’s only natural that a download store emerge as the top seller.

But anybody older is going to remember that it wasn’t too long ago when music buying meant flipping through CD racks at the former retail powerhouses.

Other than destroying the nostalgia of flipping through unorganized CD racks and purchasing an entire CD to get your hands on that one song, Apple’s success is weakening Wal-Mart’s power to censor the music industry.

With its roots in the Southern Christian heartland, Wal-Mart believes that being a “family” store is the key to their mass appeal. They refuse to carry CDs with cover art or lyrics deemed overtly sexual or dealing with topics such as abortion, homosexuality or Satanism. While Wal-Mart is the world’s largest CD retailer, and in some regions the only place in town to purchase music entertainment products represent only a fraction of their business. However, it is a different story for recording artists. Because Wal-Mart reaps about 10 percent of the total domestic music CD sales, most musicians and record companies will agree to create a “sanitized” version specifically for the megastores.

....

[W]hen Sheryl Crow released her self-titled album [in 1996], Wal-Mart objected to the lyric, “Watch our children as they kill each other with a gun they bought at Wal-Mart discount stores.” When Crow would not change the verse, the retailer refused to carry the album. This type of censorship has become so common that it is often regarded as simply another stage of editing. Record labels are now acting preemptively, issuing two versions of the same album for their big name artists. Less well-known bands, however, are forced to offer “sanitized” albums out of the gate.

As music commerce rapidly shifts from physical to virtual stores, Wal-Mart’s interpretation of family values will lose it’s power to prevent their customer base from being exposed to certain viewpoints.

*****

Dear Apple,
Thanks for helping restore my spirit to the music industry.
Sincerely,
The First Amendment.

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A flurry of stories in the news today about Wal-Mart in the United Kingdom. After announcing 2007’s fourth quarter sales yesterday, Asda came out as one of Wal-Mart’s strongest units. Not surprisingly, a second series of announcements make known Wal-Mart’s intentions to expand in the country. Up until now, Wal-Mart has had trouble expanding in Britain, as the country’s strict zoning laws make Wal-Mart’s sprawling supercenters difficult to build. But as Wal-Mart meets increasing opposition and market saturation in the U.S., foreign markets - even with all their challenges - are starting to look pretty good.

Wal-Mart unveils strong overseas growth, led by Asda [Reuters]

Sales from Asda stores open at least a year, a key gauge in the industry, rose in the “mid-single digits” excluding the positive impact from fuel…

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, is increasingly turning to its international operations to dazzle investors as its U.S. business struggles with limited growth and flagging sales at its near-4,100 stores.

Asda set to call an end to its recovery plan [Financial Times]

Much of the credit for the continued improvement in Asda’s performance will go to Andy Bond, who was brought in as chief executive in March 2005. Mr Bond is expected to say at a news conference today that much of the recovery has been achieved and Asda will concentrate on growth…

After missing profit targets in his first year, Mr Bond has since turned the business round and Wal-Mart said yesterday that Asda had beaten internal sales and profit forecasts.

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Today’s Telegraph suggests a brilliant sales strategy to ASDA Wal-Mart: Instead of relentlessly lobbying the British government to change U.K. development laws to better suit your unsustainable, American building practices, why don’t you just try SELLING THINGS?

Time for Asda to ask itself ‘why lobby more?’ and compete [Telegraph (U.K.)]

It wasn’t just small shopkeepers who must have been left disappointed by Friday’s Competition Commission report.

For Asda, the UK’s third largest supermarket, the remedies statement must have been at least something of a disappointment - although publicly the retailer was putting on a brave face, insisting that it welcomed the report.

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