Giant superstore chain Wal-Mart is having an incredibly bad week.
I will leave it to the pundits, pontificators and gasbags to work out whether the charges against the company - from being heartless greedy jerks to racists to scumbags and everything in between - are true.
Let's review the current Wal-Mart news:
1) The company has been on the defensive in recent months since the release of the documentary, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price by the director of Outfoxed. A review of the new Wal-Mart movie is here. I'm leading a discussion of the movie myself.
2) Yesterday Wal-Mart apologized for what it called programming problems that encouraged people interested in seeing Planet of the Apes to check out
black literature.
Some liberal bloggers jumped on the story as proof that Wal-Mart is racist. It should be noted that this particular blogger, Steve Gilliard, is the same guy who I wrote about here for making racist comments about a Black Republican.
Others thought this was much ado about nothing, noting that Wal-Mart's statement also says: "To further illustrate the bizarre nature of this technical issue, the site is also mapping movies such as Home Alone and Power Puff Girls to African American literature.
A more comprehensive look at bloggers thoughts on the issue is here.
The blog Crooks and Liars posted a link about the story but later - after getting much buzz, some mentions in news stories and aware of massive
pontificating on the issue - said it never intended to suggest a racist conspiracy on the part of Wal-Mart
3) Both Crooks and Liars and FireDogLake - which "broke" the Planet of the Apes controversy - have made another allegation against Wal-Mart: That it is heartless when it comes to the homeless.
Seems the company has decided not to give expired or near expired food to
the homeless any more out of concern it might lead to liability issues if anyone should get sick.
4) According to today's Washington Post, a Wal-Mart executive has admitted he is guilty of five counts of wire fraud.
5) And I have not even mentioned the class action law suits by former employees accusing the company of sexism, labor violations, etc.
But hey, it is ok because Wal-Mart says quite clearly on its own Web site that it does not need unions.
All in all, though, this is not the best week for Wal-Mart.
Article comments
1 - Victor Lana
Why would anyone suggest that people looking to buy Planet of the Apes videos should check out anything about blacks? It's ignorance and sounds racist to me. If it was a mistake it says something about how poorly Walmart is run.
2 - Scott Butki
Wal-Mart is suggesting it's just a weird computer glitch but it's a pretty specific and weird glitch.
3 - Sam Jack
Well, just searching at random, I found a book about the holocaust at Walmart that under related items says, "See our great selection of contact lenses."
I can't imagine Wal-Mart intentionally doing that, evil though they may be.
4 - Sam Jack
Correction on that last, Wal-Mart has replaced all 'related books' stuff with things that could not possibly be offensive. Like 'Search 30,000 Textbooks' and the contact lenses. So scratch the first sentence.
-Sam
5 - Jared
On their site, they categorize each item. Items with matching categories come up as prospective matches. The MLK video and the Planet of the Apes shared a category grouping. Box set, I think. It makes perfect sense from a computing standpoint. Not cool, but I think they get a pass here.
6 - Scott Butki
So it was just a formatting error?
Could be.
7 - Scott Butki
We had 10 people - equalled only by my showing of Supersize Me (reviewed here) - today when I showed the Wal-Mart movie.
I'll write up a review of the movie tomorrow.
8 - Scott Butki
Oh I forgot the local big news on Wal-Mart, which I'll write more about tomorrow or Thursday:
A vote is expected Thursday on whether to override a veto of the so-called Wal-Mart bill which would place requirements on companies of Wal-Marts size.
Details are here.
9 - Scott Butki
I have been struggling to write up my review of the new Wal-Mart movie.
Meanwhile I came across an excellent review in Reason that spelled out - sometimes in language more blunk and adult than I would use - the movie's problems.
It's well worth a read.
My problems with the movie include that while it should be shooting fish in a barrell it instead is sloppy, unorganized, oversimplified, patronizing.
As that review says....
A "quack" has been defined as someone who's got something good for you, no matter what's wrong with you. That must make documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald a kind of anti-quack. No matter what you think is wrong with the worldâ€"environmental degradation, street crime, poverty, outsourcing, racial prejudice, failing public schoolsâ€"Greenwald knows something that's making the problem worse: Wal-Mart.
In Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, the director of Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism and Uncovered: The War on Iraq, flings an ample supply of feces at the world's largest retailer and hopes that some of it will stick. Some of it does. But a far larger pile, alas, sails from the screen, falls short of its target, and lands with an unceremonious plop on your coffee table.
That's too bad, because there are some solid points in the film, providing genuine grounds for criticism of Wal-Mart.
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I'll write up my review this weekend
10 - Scott Butki
Wal-Mart has suffered two more crushing blows, in Maryland and Pa., as I
write about here.
11 - Scott Butki
The so-called Wal-Mart Bill has been overturned
by a judge.