Posted on 11/01/2005 5:41:13 AM PST by fight_truth_decay
BENTONVILLE, Ark., Oct. 26 - Inside a stuffy, windowless room here, veterans of the 2004 Bush and Kerry presidential campaigns sit, stand and pace around six plastic folding tables. Open containers of pistachio nuts and tropical trail mix compete for space with laptops and BlackBerries. CNN flickers on a television in the corner.
Spencer Tirey for The New York Times Wal-Mart's team of marketing specialists works in a second-floor conference room at the company's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.
A documentary about Wal-Mart Stores is to open today in theaters. The phone rings, and a 20-something woman answers. "Turn on Fox," she yells, running up to the TV with a notepad. "This could be important."
A scene from a campaign war room? Well, sort of. It is a war room inside the headquarters of Wal-Mart, the giant discount retailer that hopes to sell a new, improved image to reluctant consumers.
Wal-Mart is taking a page from the modern political playbook. Under fire from well-organized opponents who have hammered the retailer with criticisms of its wages, health insurance and treatment of workers, Wal-Mart has quietly recruited former presidential advisers, including Michael K. Deaver, who was Ronald Reagan's image-meister, and Leslie Dach, one of Bill Clinton's media consultants, to set up a rapid-response public relations team in Arkansas.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Cut from Raw Story link to Times:
The first big challenge of the strategy will come Nov. 1 with the premiere of an unflattering documentary. "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" was made on a shoestring budget of $1.8 million and will be released in about two dozen theaters. But its director, Robert Greenwald, hopes to show the movie in thousands of homes and churches in the next month. The possibility that it might become a cult hit like Michael Moore's 1989 unsympathetic portrait of General Motors, "Roger & Me," has Wal-Mart worried.
So, Wal-Mart has embarked on a counteroffensive that would have been unthinkable even a year ago. Relying on a preview posted online, Wal-Mart investigated the events described in the film and produced a short video contending the film has factual errors. (Mr. Greenwald denies there are errors and says that Wal-Mart has not seen the final cut.)
Wal-Mart has also begun to promote a second film, "Why Wal-Mart Works & Why That Makes Some People Crazy," which casts the company in a rosier light. Wal-Mart declined to make its executives available for the Greenwald film, but it participated with the second film's director, Ron Galloway. The war room team helped distribute a letter, written by Mr. Galloway, that challenges Mr. Greenwald to show the two movies side-by-side.
To keep up with its critics, Wal-Mart "has to run a campaign," said Robert McAdam, a former political strategist at the Tobacco Institute who now oversees Wal-Mart's corporate communications. "It's simply nonsense for us to let some of these attacks go without a response."
Wal-Mart's aggressive new posture is a departure from its tradition of relying on an internal staff to manage the company's image. The war room, which is part of a larger Wal-Mart effort to portray itself as more worker-friendly and environmentally conscious, runs counter to the philosophy of the chain's founder, Sam Walton. Believing that public relations was a waste of time and money, the penny-pinching Mr. Walton would not likely have hired a public relations firm like Edelman, Wal-Mart's choice to operate its war room.
CUT
Once a darling of Wall Street, Wal-Mart's stock price has fallen 27 percent since 2000, when H. Lee Scott Jr. became chief executive, a drop that executives have said reflects, in part, investors' anxieties about the company's image. Sales growth at stores open for more than a year has slowed to an average of 3.5 percent a month this year, compared with 6.3 percent at Target. And Wal-Mart is facing growing resistance to new urban stores, with high- profile defeats in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.
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The contract went to Edelman, which assigned its top two Washington operatives to the account. Wal-Mart would not say what it is paying Edelman, nor would it allow interviews with the war room staff. Mr. Dach, who is active in environmental and Democratic causes, was an outside adviser to President Clinton during the impeachment battle. Mr. Deaver was President Reagan's communications director and the creative force behind Mr. Reagan's so-called Teflon image.
Edelman also dispatched at least six former political operatives to Bentonville, including Jonathan Adashek, director of national delegate strategy for John Kerry, and David White, who helped manage the 1998 re-election of Representative Nancy Johnson, a Connecticut Republican. Terry Nelson, who was the national political director of the 2004 Bush campaign, advises the group.
In turn, Wakeup Wal-Mart is led by, among others, Paul Blank, former political director for the Howard Dean presidential campaign, and Chris Kofinis, who helped create the DraftWesleyClark.com campaign.
Wal-Mart Watch's media team includes Jim Jordan, former director of the Kerry campaign, and Tracy Sefl, a former Democratic National Committee aide responsible for distributing negative press reports about President Bush during the 2004 campaign.
Full story: Here
Not in the last two or three decades.
"A scene from a campaign war room? Well, sort of. It is a war room inside the headquarters of Wal-Mart, the giant discount retailer that hopes to sell a new, improved image to reluctant consumers."
I don't like Wal-Mart and rarely shop there.
However, the term "reluctant customers" hardly applies to most folks.
How can you tell you work for Wal-Mart? By the office furniture!
....and yet in the red states, where people value value and values, WalMart gets a quiet, warm reception.
Breaking news? More Walrmart bashing... nothing new from what I've seen. Some people hate success. Walmart, go sit over there on the bench with Microsoft.
Good observation. I do think it's a City Mouse vs Country Mouse thing. Walmart creates jobs in rural areas. The mom and pop stores can't afford to pay high salaries and benefits there either so Walmart is an improvement and employs so many more. In rural areas Walmart is often the only game in town.
No, they had to move her to concrete, lest her weight cause her to fall through.
My typical Walmart shopping list (all items made in America):
meat
sausage
tropicana orange juice
milk
eggs
cheese (Vermont, does that count?)
bread
salami
lunchables
cereal
frozen pictsweet vegetables
California Avocados
Georgia onions
Maine lobster
frozen raspberries (Washington State)
Saltines
Lysol
Wisk
Clorox
Cascade
Hanes socks
Hanes undergarments
Crayola Crayons
These items are all MADE in AMERICA
As is 90% of the other stuff Walmart sells.
To hear the Wally Bashers here, you'd think the Ma/Pa places manufacture and sell Made in the USA only. Fact is, they have a store front, hire their family and friends, and stock stuff out of China and India (note alll the little ma/pa implement dealers selling Mahindra tractors---hint: not made in Ohio!).
MaPa will NOT hire their small-town enemies, or the 'wierd' people. And there are quite a few "southern democrats" left in the country who haven't figured out that their party left them behind, and you have to endure Al Franken on the radio in some MaPa stores!
I live in the boonies, and I go to the close in ma/pa place for half-stop groceries and generic plumbing parts first, but when they don't have everything (which is always) I still have to go to Wally World or worse, a trip into "the city."
That's right. Everybody b*t*****g about insurance, benefits, wages and yet who makes the grade? Wal-Mart. Who truly lends a helping hand to victims? Who makes sure their EMPLOYEES are taken care of? Wal-Mart. I'm sick of those on this forum, the elitist know-it-all snobs that do the same bashing with their self-righteous snide remarks. We'll continue to support folks like Wal-Mart and some snob that makes a "Wal-Mart" slam in my hearing may end up with a broken jaw. If some don't like the business, then by God, shop somewhere else and STFU! Spoiled, pampered girly-men.
Do family run convienence stores in your area send out crews to pick up soda bottles and snack wrappers that inevitably come from thier operations.
Just because a company is big is not reason to wish for additional government regulation.
No, but I think they should. Who do you think should clean it up? At least with my idea the people who profit from selling the stuff bear the burden. As far back as the Code of Hammurabi, the best laws have been those that make people responsible for their own decisions.
before we got our SuperWally, the closest department store of ANY KIND for me was twenty miles away and even further for the other 2/3 of the county. that's two gallons of gas times the thousands of customers a day 365 days a year saved by our SuperWally, not counting all the accidents avoided from not having to drive to another county for everything year round(think Snow/Ice) PLUS the sales tax the county gets let alone all the jobs and pretty soon you're talkin real money.
Kerry fired Jim Jordan as his campaign manager, replacing him with Mary Beth Cahill, who had been chief of staff to Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)
My best friend, who has always been non political, was bragging about picketing her local Walmart for her union. She proceeded to give me the usual song and dance about evil Walmart. I would really hate to lose a friend of over 25 years. I did ask her to ask some questions at her next union meeting. I tried to explain how unions have sent our work to other countries. She just responded that she doesn't care about the rich in this country. Evil corporations, etc. sigh
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