Selling Wal-Mart ......... The New Yorker

On the second floor of Wal-Mart’s headquarters, in Bentonville, Arkansas, is a windowless room called Action Alley. In the Wal-Mart idiom, the term “Action Alley” usually refers to the main aisle of the company’s two thousand Supercenters—the stores that have upended the retail business by selling enormous quantities of groceries and imported goods at prices that competitors find difficult or impossible to match. At the “home office,” as Bentonville is known, Action Alley is the company’s war room, a communications center that was set up and is staffed by Washington-based operatives from Edelman, a public-relations firm that advises companies on issues of “reputation management.” Wal-Mart corporate culture is parsimonious except in the matter of executive compensation, but, according to a source, the company has been paying Edelman roughly ten million dollars annually to renovate its reputation.

Twenty years ago, Wal-Mart was widely viewed as a scrappy regional retailer, and its founder, Sam Walton, an Ozarks eccentric with a vision of super-discounting, was praised for intuiting the needs of his customers, and for maintaining high morale among his workers. When Walton retired, in 1988 (he died in 1992), the company had revenues of sixteen billion dollars. Today, Wal-Mart is the second-largest company in the world in terms of revenue—only ExxonMobil is bigger. Its revenues last year came to more than three hundred and fifteen billion dollars, with profits of more than eleven billion, and it has developed a reputation as a worldwide colossus that provides poor pay and miserly benefits to its 1.8 million employees. The image of the company is not helped by the immoderation of Sam Walton’s widow and children, who together control forty per cent of Wal-Mart’s outstanding shares, and who are worth roughly eighty billion dollars; they are, by a striking margin, the richest family in America. (They are worth more than Warren Buffett and Bill Gates combined.)

Wal-Mart is traditionally a Republican-leaning company (during the past fifteen years, more than seventy-five per cent of its political donations have gone to Republicans) and has become a favorite target of Democratic politicians. Hillary Clinton, who once served on Wal-Mart’s board, recently returned a five-thousand-dollar donation because of what a campaign spokeswoman said were “serious differences with current company practices.” Barack Obama and John Edwards have joined union-led campaigns to denounce the company for its wage-and-benefit policies. Wal-Mart is notably unfriendly to unions; in 2000, when meat-cutters at a single Wal-Mart in Texas organized into a collective-bargaining unit, Wal-Mart responded by shutting down its meat counters across Texas and in five neighboring states. It closed an entire store in Quebec, rather than see workers unionize.

The company has also been criticized for driving American jobs overseas, by demanding immense discounts from its suppliers. Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat who is one of Wal-Mart’s main foes in Congress, says that the company, by forcing its suppliers to manufacture goods in China, shows that it “doesn’t stand for American values.” Wal-Mart has been the subject of numerous unflattering documentaries and books. Even Ron Galloway, the maker of a recent pro-Wal-Mart documentary, “Why Wal-Mart Works and Why That Makes Some People Crazy,” has turned against the company. Galloway told me that he now considers Wal-Mart to be a “heartless” employer. “They just instituted a wage cap for long-term employees—people making between thirteen and eighteen dollars an hour. It’s a form of accelerated attrition. They can’t expect me to defend that,” Galloway said.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/02/070402fa_fact_goldberg

They have taken his dream and turned into a nightmare.
Wal-Mart under Sam Walton would have promoted local American made products. He made sure people were treated right.
My family has been involved with Wal-Mart for more than 20 years and seen it when it was a family owned business under the watchful eye of Sam Walton to the monster is has become. Many Assistant Store managers with long company service are fleeing the company for other smaller more friendly companies. When your long service employees are willing to throw away company service, and vacation you know something is terribly wrong. Terribly

Do I recall correctly that Wal-Mart did have a big "Buy American" campaign for a while - and then got busted for misrepresenting Chinese goods as made in America? And that this happened under Sam?

American made goods. After he died they continued to profess to be selling American made while it quickly became Chinese made. They were finally outed for this @2000 I think.
Walmart today and the Walmart that Sam Walton founded are not the same company. I think a guy named Lee Scott (not sure) turned Sam's dream into our nightmare.

Once they had Sam in the dirt they could take the company where it had never been and screw the America people out of every penny they could pick from their pockets.

was the great "selling" point for WalMart, besides price?

It is sad that in small towns in Indiana so many people do not see the link between shopping at Wal-Mart and the loss of their small or medium sized manufacturing job. I liken the blue collar workers in Indiana that are in the lines at Wal-Mart as being engaged in a sort of slow motion economic suicide. To top it all off, many of these same small town blue collar workers vote Republican because they believe the massive amount of GOP propaganda swirling about and the likes of Rush Limbaugh. It is very, very sad.

The Great Wal-Mart of China has given new meaning to the term "selling out." They have literally been selling out this country, systematically forcing manufacturing jobs overseas. I hope a reaction is setting in, but how will we get the jobs back?