Is Wal-Mart Evil (cont.)?

Dispute its political ways and means, but there is no doubting that Wal-Mart is slowly shifting its marketing campaign to a hipper approach -- following the model of fellow low-cost chain Target. In fact, Dicker notes that Wal-Mart hired away Target's director of marketing. That can be seen in the retail behemoth's new ad campaigns, as the chain's TV spots featuring real people and employees from the heartland are slowly disappearing in favor of a focus on the store's sales items, or having country music megastar Garth Brooks come out of retirement to make humorous commercials for the Christmas season, as the chain tries "to reposition its brand and be more relevant to upper-income shoppers." 

"It's a huge shift for them, because of how they've been slammed. I don't think any other company in this country has been slammed at the same time on so many fronts as Wal-Mart," said Dicker. "You have so many different fronts to attack, from the decline of opportunities for small businesspeople, to shaving hours off employee timecards, basic union busting, and the way they help create [automobile] dependence due to furthering urban sprawl with locations outside actual city limits."

One example of this sprawl was fought in the Los Angeles suburb of Rosemead, located in the heart of the San Gabriel Valley. The working-class, predominantly Latino and Asian city of 53,000 engaged in a turbulent battle over whether to allow a new Wal-Mart Supercenter into its environs, with some community activists leading a raucous fight against the company over issues such as traffic and congestion -- going so far as to demand the recall of its longtime mayor and a city councilman for approving Wal-Mart's efforts. While the Rosemead city council ultimately stopped the recall vote from taking place, the fight underscored just how personal such battles can get.

"At first I got into this fight over the location, which is very inappropriate to me. It's across the street from the high school I actually went to. The site is in Rosemead, but everyone affected will be outside the town and in unincorporated Los Angeles County," said Todd Kunioka, a volunteer with the anti-Wal-Mart group Save Our Community (SOC). "They did that, I suspect, so that most of the people affected couldn't vote on whether to allow it. As I've seen what Wal-Mart is doing to get the site and win, I've become more opposed to having Wal-Mart anywhere in the city."

Meanwhile, fellow SOC member Jim Flournoy pointed out the traffic issues that a new Supercenter would bring to his town.

"We found out that Wal-Mart's traffic study was so limited, you couldn't determine where their customers were coming from and therefore couldn't plan the flow right," said Flournoy. "Wal-Mart really wants to turn the Supercenter into a shopping center. They say we'll have 12,000 car trips a day coming here, but we'll really have more like 18,000 trips a day. We can't handle that, and I also believe that they'll cause a drag on the wages in this area, bringing down the economy by just shifting how money is spent."

If Dicker's assessment that Wal-Mart strategically places itself on the fringes of larger urban areas holds true, then Rosemead would be perfect supporting evidence. On the contrary, in neighboring Pasadena, public information officer Ann Erdman notes the stores aren't coming anywhere inside the city.

"This is not a big-box community; [that’s] not the direction that economic development is going to be taking in Pasadena. As has been exhibited for the past few years in Pasadena, there's a lot of mixed use, part retail, residential and commercial structures going up," said Erdman. "When there is a national or international chain, we'll have smaller versions, like Tiffany's. In Pasadena, there's not any empty land of significance. Any kind of big box requires not only the space for the facility but acres and acres are needed for parking."

One man at the center of Wal-Mart's current whirlwind of controversy is filmmaker Robert Greenwald, an avowed and unrepentant liberal who produces documentaries that rival Michael Moore's in their slash-and-burn fury. He has flat-out declared that President Bush stole the 2000 election, claimed to expose corruption and excessive right-wing bias at every level of the Fox News Channel, and produced a biopic of the life of the 1960s super-radical Abbie Hoffman.

After he turned his sights on Wal-Mart with his film Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, the retail giant's PR team wanted the media and public to remember Greenwald as a "failed fantasy filmmaker," thanks to his 1980 Olivia Newton-John roller-skating film debacle, Xanadu.

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price is affecting in many ways, as it builds its case by showing how Wal-Mart openings in small towns nationwide allegedly caused countless family businesses to close. As it continues, the film offers dozens of statistics that paint Wal-Mart in an unfavorable light, such as claiming that the average annual employee earnings are barely over $13,000, and that Wal-Mart's pay scales drive retail wages down by $3 billion a year nationally.

The film also claims Wal-Mart costs taxpayers over $1.557 billion per year, alleging the company has told some employees to use their state health-care systems if they can't afford the company's health plan. Even more disturbing is a scene that shows how Wal-Mart makes extensive use of Chinese laborers, who appear to live in squalor in extremely cramped high-rises.

"UC Berkeley research found that Wal-Mart costs $86 million a year to California taxpayers and $25 million to L.A. County by exploiting the state health-care system. It also affects employee pride and morale when they can't afford their own care," said Greenwald in a phone interview from Washington, D.C., where he had just testified about Wal-Mart before Congress. "We've got a series of bills that protect communities and workers to make sure Wal-Mart isn't abusing their power and size to ensure they are paying fair costs, as they should."

Greenwald decided to pursue Wal-Mart as a subject when a friend of his with chronic health issues was hired by the chain and still couldn't afford the company's health plan. The friend had been told by his managers to partake of the taxpayer-funded health services provided by the state, a decision that sparked a fury in the filmmaker.

"Wal-Mart's own studies found that 43% of their employees' children don't have health care," said Greenwald. "That's an obscene figure for a corporation that makes hundreds of billions of dollars."

Even before the film was released in mid-November 2005, Greenwald and his movie were subjected to an onslaught of rebuttals by Wal-Mart officials. In fact, Wal-Mart offered over 20 pages of arguments against the film's claims, creating a he-said/she-said situation in which Greenwald rebutted the retailer’s rebuttals.

"Our size makes us the target of special interest groups, lawyers or unions who have their own specific agendas. We see that there are some people that don't like the fact that we have standards, like not carrying certain men's magazines and only carrying edited CDs rather than [parental warning] stickered ones," said Christi Davis Gallagher, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart. "We realize we're visited by over 100 million Americans every week and many of those are families with children, whom we want to be comfortable coming into our stores, providing them good value but also making sure their kids won't be exposed to something embarrassing while walking the aisle."