On the Wal-Mart Money Trail (Why the left HATES Walmart!)

The (left wing) Nation ^ | [from the November 21, 2005 issue] | LIZA FEATHERSTONE

[narses]

In an unprecedented collaboration, The Nation, The American Prospect, In These Times and AlterNet are focusing attention on issues raised by the new documentary, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. On AlterNet, Joshua Holland explores the hidden costs of Wal-Mart's cheap merchandise from China in "Wal-Mart's China Price," and Greg LeRoy looks at sweetheart taxpayer subsidies in "Wal-Mart's Tax on Us."

In The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson's "Open Doors, Closed Minds" explores how one Wal-Mart true believer was excommunicated for his faith in doing what he thought the company expected of him: crying foul. Christoper Hayes of In These Times explores Wal-Mart as a "Symbol of the System."

Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. Thanks to Laura Starecheski, who contributed reporting, and to Meleiza Figueroa, a researcher on Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price who, with the generous consent of her employer, shared her findings.

With a combined fortune of more than $90 billion, the Waltons--the immediate heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton--are the richest family in the world. Five of the country's ten richest individuals are members of Sam's immediate family: his wife, Helen, and their three surviving children--Rob, Jim and Alice--as well as his late son John's widow, Christy (John Walton died in June when his private plane crashed). Until recently, however, they gave away little of their fortune. As Sam Walton explained in his 1992 autobiography, Made in America, he didn't believe in giving "any undeserving stranger a free ride." Nor did he believe in being generous with company profits. "We feel very strongly," he wrote, "that Wal-Mart really is not, and should not be, in the charity business." Money that Wal-Mart donated to charity, he reasoned, would only come out of the pockets of "either our shareholders or our customers." (He didn't mention workers, perhaps a tacit acknowledgment that picking their pockets was just business as usual.) As for politics, Sam couldn't stand the stuff. At a 1988 Mother's Day "toast and roast" honoring Helen Walton, then-Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas quipped that waiting for big campaign contributions from the Waltons was like "leaving landing lights on for Amelia Earhart."

All that has changed. Since Sam died in 1992, both the Bentonville, Arkansas-based company and the family have dramatically escalated their charitable giving, becoming far more influential in the worlds of philanthropy and politics. It is hardly a coincidence that this transformation occurred after Wal-Mart became the nation's largest private employer and a flytrap for much-deserved criticism. The company is battling numerous employee rights lawsuits in court, the biggest of these being Betty Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, a sex-discrimination class action representing 1.6 million women. Communities around the nation, charging that the company is a stingy low-wage employer with an arrogant disregard for local and national laws, are battling to keep Wal-Mart from opening or expanding stores. Several labor unions have made fighting Wal-Mart a top priority. This year two major national organizations, Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart, formed to lead a citizens' movement to pressure the company to change its ways.

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), a watchdog group, released a report in September, The Waltons and Wal-Mart: Self-Interested Philanthropy, detailing the recent increase in Wal-Mart and Walton philanthropy and noting its likely relationship to the company's image problems. Indeed, the increase has been staggering. The Walton Family Foundation (WFF) gave away $106.9 million in 2003--the most recent year for which data are available--twice as much as in 2000. Wal-Mart's company PAC, now the third-largest corporate PAC and the second-largest corporate donor to the GOP, gave away $2.1 million in 2004, compared with just $100,000 in 1994. The Walton family, too, has greatly increased its political giving; in 2004, for example, Alice donated $2.6 million to the influential Republican PAC Progress for America, which supported the sleazy Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and gave Bush a critical push in the election's final months. Since 1999 the Wal-Mart Foundation (WMF)--a company-controlled entity with no direct connection to the WFF--has tripled its giving and by the end of this year will have doled out more than $200 million in cash and merchandise, according to spokeswoman Melissa O'Brien.

The company also donated $20 million in cash and merchandise to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, garnering extensive--and partially justified--praise. To antigovernment zealots like New York Times columnist John Tierney and the wing nuts running the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Wal-Mart's impressive response to the hurricane showed that the private sector is simply more effective than the government. It is true that when you starve government by draining its resources and electing officials who don't believe in it, nothing seems to work. But Wal-Mart played a major role in that eviscerating process. Much of Wal-Mart's philanthropy (as well as that of the Walton family) has been directed toward promoting anti-government politics, whether by lobbying against high taxes for the rich or contributing to Republican candidates, conservative think tanks and efforts to privatize education.

Jeff Krehely, who co-wrote the NCRP report, says that for his organization, such a sharp increase in giving, coupled with the company's obvious desire to spin itself as a better corporate citizen, "raises red flags. We wonder, What's the agenda here? What's happening?" The WMF's Melissa O'Brien told The Nation that criticisms of the company come from "special-interest groups" and do not influence its giving. She also told the New York Sun that the NCRP report was funded by Target, a charge Krehely calls "ludicrous." (Dayton Hudson, Target's former parent company, contributed to the NCRP in the 1990s. In 2000 the company reorganized as the Target Corporation and hasn't contributed to the watchdog group since.)

Each Walton heir has philanthropic projects of his or her own--Alice, for example, is building a world-class art museum in northwest Arkansas--but the family fortune should be considered as one because most of the money is managed together. The giving is also largely administered together, through the Walton Family Foundation, as well as through close communication among its family members. (At least twice a year, the family meets to talk about how to spend its money.) The Waltons own about 40 percent of Wal-Mart's stock, making Wal-Mart essentially a family business--highly unusual for a large multinational company. (Both the Wal-Mart Family Foundation and Walton Enterprises--the company that represents the Walton family's interests--declined to cooperate with this article, or to make any of the notoriously press-shy Waltons available for interviews.)

Philanthropy obscures the often unseemly process by which the money was made--and for Wal-Mart that's at least part of the point. Stephen Copley, a United Methodist Church pastor who serves on the board of the Arkansas Single Parents Scholarship Fund, a Springdale, Arkansas, charity that has benefited from Walton dollars, says that the program has "an incredible success rate. One lady even got a PhD. [The Walton money] does a tremendous amount of good." However, he adds, "it's great to help single parents go to school, but those same single parents might be working for Wal-Mart, and they can't afford health insurance." Copley, also head of the Arkansas Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, is troubled that in his home state, Walton and Wal-Mart generosity "gets great media...they look so good even though in reality their business practices are very bad."

The Wal-Mart Foundation gives a staggering number of gifts, apparently in order to buy goodwill in as many communities as possible, rather than, as Krehely points out, "giving to sustain organizations." The WMF's 2003 IRS 990 form is 2,239 pages long, far longer than that of the Ford Foundation, which has billions more in assets. That's because most WMF gifts are tiny: thousands or even hundreds of dollars to churches and Lions clubs and Boys and Girls clubs, $500 to the YMCA of Nashville and Middle Tennessee and to the Tulip Trace (Indiana) Girl Scouts Council and so on. Communities where Wal-Mart faced a particular battle over opening a new store--Inglewood, California, or New York City--enjoyed especially generous largesse. Like the flowers and other tokens of courtship from a suitor who later becomes a wife-beater, such gifts are often followed by demands for public subsidies and tax breaks. In this way Wal-Mart is repeating the strategy that has served it so well in Arkansas, where Wal-Mart and the Waltons' charitable gifts are many and company critics are relatively few. Says Lindsay Brown, president of the Central Arkansas Labor Council, "It's a hell of a plan, and it works."

We are supposed to applaud philanthropy--the very word connotes altruism and "giving back"--but Walton and Wal-Mart giving serves as a reminder that philanthropy provides an alternative to taxation, a way for rich people and corporations to decide what to do with their extra money, as opposed to letting the rest of us decide through our elected governments. Since charitable donations are a tax write-off, as Krehely points out, "they are supposed to benefit the public good." He thinks it is reasonable to ask whether a family's--or a company's--philanthropy serves the common good, or at least enough good "to make up for the public revenue that we're losing."

Funny he should mention taxes: Wal-Mart and the Waltons have, after all, been notably reluctant to pay them. Not only has the company lobbied for tax breaks in communities all over the nation, the Waltons--the family that former Wal-Mart board member Hillary Clinton has called "the best America has to offer"--have campaigned vigorously against the estate tax. They have donated money to its opponents, Republicans like John Thune of South Dakota and David Vitter of Louisiana, and enlisted one of Washington's top lobbying firms, Patton Boggs--a leading anti-estate tax lobbyist--to represent their interests.

Chuck Collins of Responsible Wealth, a group of well-off people who strongly favor the estate tax, observes that the Waltons sometimes say the estate tax is not a priority for the family. "That may be true from their perspective," he says, "but it's a bit like an elephant saying it's really not interested in stepping on anthills. When you're America's wealthiest family, you are a philanthropic and lobbying heavyweight even on your minor interests." For instance, Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, one of a handful of Democrats who draw checks from the Waltons, supports estate-tax repeal (or crippling "reform"). "Senator Lincoln will wax eloquent about the small farmers of Arkansas," Collins says, "but what's really on her mind is Walton."

In addition to campaigning specifically against the estate tax, the Waltons also give money to groups that generally favor tax giveaways to the rich, like Americans for Tax Reform. And the Waltons have already reaped the benefits of tax policies enacted by the conservatives they helped put in office: This year Bush's dividend tax cut will save the family $51 million, according to Lee Farris, an estate-tax expert with the Boston-based United for a Fair Economy.

The Waltons' philanthropy--and their hostility to paying their fair share of taxes--also needs to be viewed in the context of tax subsidies Wal-Mart has received for building new stores, which Good Jobs First places at more than $1 billion, an estimate that does not include the many other ways taxpayers subsidize Wal-Mart stores, for instance, through numerous forms of public assistance--Medicaid, Food Stamps, public housing--that often allow workers to subsist on Wal-Mart's low wages. A report by the House Education and Workforce Committee conservatively places the latter at $420,750 per store; the Wal-Mart Foundation's per-store charitable giving is just 11 percent of that amount ($47,222).

In addition to spending on Republican candidates, the Waltons have lavished funds on right-wing ideological institutions--organizations that serve the interest of wealthy individuals and lawless antiunion companies like Wal-Mart. From 1998 through 2003 the WFF contributed $25,000 to the Heritage Foundation, $15,000 to the Cato Institute, $125,000 to the Hudson Institute, $155,000 to the Goldwater Institute, $70,000 to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, $300,000 to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, $185,000 to the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy and $350,000 to the Evergreen Freedom Foundation.

Both the family and the company have made education a major funding priority. Many of the WFF's education gifts have a distinct ideological tilt, emphasizing a "free market" approach to education reform, a vision the late John Walton embraced with particular enthusiasm. The WFF funds advocacy groups promoting conservative school "reform"--otherwise known as privatization--like the Center for Education Reform and the Black Alliance for Educational Options, as well as the actual programs these groups champion: charter schools and voucher programs. (The BAEO did not return calls for this article.)

Among such projects, the Waltons tend to fund the most mind-numbing and cultish, giving in 2003 alone nearly $3 million to Knowledge Is Power (KIPP) schools and millions more to other schools using the KIPP curriculum, which emphasizes regimented recitation rather than critical or creative thinking. Particularly widespread in low-income neighborhoods, such schools seem bent on disciplining and exhorting the poor rather than developing human potential (much like Wal-Mart as a workplace, with its relentless company cheers and dead-end jobs). Several years ago the principal of New York City's John A. Reisenbach Charter School, which uses the KIPP curriculum and received $118,000 from the Waltons in 2003, told me proudly, as we watched fidgety second graders chant meaningless slogans, "We are getting them ready for business."

The WFF has become the single largest source of funding for the voucher and charter school movement. Walton funding allows some charter schools to spend more per pupil than "competing" public schools. The ironic result is that while these projects are supposed to demonstrate to the public the wonders of a marketized approach to education, the WFF's money gives its grantees an advantage over other schools, allowing them to perform better than they would otherwise. "[The Waltons] claim to support competition and the free market," says Paul Dunphy, a policy analyst for Citizens for Public Schools, a Boston-based coalition, "but actually they are manipulating the market, conferring advantage on their pet projects."

It's a fitting paradox, since the Wal-Mart economic model, like almost anything held up as an example of the beauty of the free market, contains so many contradictions (yes, it's extremely profitable, but look at all those tax subsidies). Because so much Walton and Wal-Mart philanthropy is crudely self-interested, it's tempting to find an equally crude motive for the Walton family's interest in education; many Wal-Mart critics have assumed that the Waltons must be planning to reap several more fortunes through for-profit education companies. That's not completely baseless: John Walton was briefly involved in such a venture. However, he backed out, realizing such profiteering was hurting the credibility of his education reform efforts. And so far, for-profit education is still not a very profitable industry--especially when compared with retail.

The Waltons' motives for supporting the privatization of education seem--at this writing, anyway--to be ideological, even idealistic, rather than an elaborate backdrop to a new money-making scheme. Like many rich Americans who have helped to finance the far right's rise to power, they have embraced a worldview in which what's good for the wealthy is good for everyone else. And greater cultural acceptance of the unfettered market--through an increasing tolerance for privatization of all kinds--will certainly make the world safer for a family business that thrives on weak government and lack of regulation. But it's also likely that the Waltons, like most right-wingers, sincerely believe that their ideas have the potential to improve people's lives. Why wouldn't the Waltons genuinely believe in the free market? Look how well it has served them.

Helen Walton, now 85 and in poor health, is expected to donate almost all of her personal fortune--worth $18 billion--to the WFF upon her death, which, as the NCRP points out, will make that entity the richest foundation in the world. This should disturb progressives, since so much Walton money goes to support conservative causes. Yet although the current direction and political leanings of Walton "philanthropy" are clear, the future is a mystery. As Krehely observes, nothing is known about the politics or interests of Sam Walton's grandchildren. This matters in a family foundation; this fall the Olin Foundation closed its doors, having spent down its endowment because the older generation did not trust the younger Olins to carry on the family's right-wing traditions. Since the Waltons don't say much about their future plans, or about their internal family politics, it's unclear what lies in store for this--currently--right-wing fortune.

"The Waltons could be an enormous force for good," says Responsible Wealth's Chuck Collins. "As the company's biggest shareholders, they could decide that Wal-Mart could pay a living wage. They could use their charitable dollars not to undermine public education but to boost educational opportunity. They could become major contributors to social good. But they're not."

One item in the Walton Family Foundation's most recent IRS filing shows how uninterested this family is in true social responsibility: a measly $6,000 to something called the Wal-Mart Associates in Need Fund. Contrast that with the millions the family spends promoting right-wing causes, and it becomes painfully clear that the Waltons value conservative ideology far more than they value the human beings who have made them the richest family on earth. Told about these figures, Kathleen MacDonald, a Wal-Mart candy department clerk in Aiken, South Carolina, responded bluntly, "All I have to say about that is, it doesn't surprise me. Like Bush, they don't have a clue what working families go through." MacDonald would like to see The Simple Life do a show about working at Wal-Mart. "I could see Paris Hilton on a register at Christmastime, or stocking shelves," she says. Or perhaps Alice Walton as a greeter, on her feet all day, thanking us for shopping at Wal-Mart.

[nmh]

I'll be stopping by sometime this weekend. We need more light bulbs for the candles in our windows.

[RFT1]

Here is WMT vs Costco


http://www.google.com/search?oi=stock&q=stocks:SFY&prev=/search%3Fq%3DSFY%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D

Not exactly a rining endorsement for shareholders. Yes, many stocks havent moved, but those are mostly compaies with little or now growth, WMT has had growth, yet its stock is standing still.

[RFT1]

OOPs wrong link

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=5y&s=WMT&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=cost

[narses]

OK, so now what?

[Real Cynic No More]

For years, liberal professionals have pushed concentrating people in locations where all their shopping and residential needs can be handled without a lot of travel. Now Walmart has made it possible for people to do the bulk of their shopping at one location so that they don't have to travel to multiple locations to meet their needs. And the liberals don't like the results of what they've asked for. It just shows their short-sightedness and their lack in ability of forward thinking.

I love it!

[thackney]

"This thread is about WalMart. Support your claim that WalMart sells more Chinese goods than other major retailers or grocery chains." Walmart alone has become the # 4 exporter of Chinese goods.

So they are evil because they are successful?

When I buy a DVD at Wal-Mart, it comes from the same source if I buy it anywhere else

When I buy a DVD at Wal-Mart, it comes from the same source if I buy it anywhere else

When I buy a DVD at Wal-Mart, it comes from the same source if I buy it anywhere else

When I buy a camera at Wal-Mart, it comes from the same source if I buy it anywhere else

When I buy a film at Wal-Mart, it comes from the same source if I buy it anywhere else

When I buy a TV at Wal-Mart, it comes from the same source if I buy it anywhere else

When I buy a bag of chips at Wal-Mart, it comes from the same source if I buy it anywhere else

When I buy a toaster at Wal-Mart, it comes from the same source if I buy it anywhere else

When I buy motor oil at Wal-Mart, it comes from the same source if I buy it anywhere else

When I buy a snow shovel at Wal-Mart, it comes from the same source if I buy it anywhere else

When I buy a garden hose at Wal-Mart, it comes from the same source if I buy it anywhere else

When I buy a book at Wal-Mart, it comes from the same source if I buy it anywhere else

[Fawn]

Why do we need any other stores?

[RFT1]

What now is look at WMT as a cpmpany that is starting to stagnate. Look at WMT as a company that is starting to suffer for its VERY bad reputation for customer service. Right or wrong, its bad PR image is taking a toll as well.

Also with your defense of Wal Mart, it seems to conflict with this.

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html

[Forte Runningrock]

I googled it.

archives.econ.utah.edu/ archives/pen-l/2003w42/msg00008.htm

[stopem]

And you for no apparent reason decide to attack my post that is clearly defending the right's positions saying we are not lemmings.....

Interesting.

I am neither for or against Walmart, I could care less whether people love or hate them. Why would anyone "Love" or "Hate' a store? Good grief people reality check here!

Do I shop Walmart? Sure on occasion. I don't shop there because of the size of the "super walmarts" I don't care to walk the size of a football field unless I haven't taken my morning jog.

[FreeRep]

One reason the left hates Walmart is because Wal-Mart has allocated the Salvation Army the greatest number of kettle locations nationally for Christmas. The Salvation Army has kettles at better than 3,600 local Wal-Mart's. The Salvation Army has a 104-year-old Christmas tradition that benefits many thousands of people in communities throughout the United States. And that why the left hates the Salvation Army and Walmart.

[onevoter]

"Much of Wal-Mart's philanthropy (as well as that of the Walton family) has been directed toward promoting anti-government politics, whether by lobbying against high taxes for the rich or contributing to Republican candidates, conservative think tanks and efforts to privatize education."

Since when was "Contributing to Republican candidates anbd conservative think-tanks" considered an anti-government policy? This writer has the nerve to call the Wall Street Journal writers wing-nuts. What a dope!

[wizardoz]

philanthropy provides an alternative to taxation, a way for rich people and corporations to decide what to do with their extra money, as opposed to letting the rest of us decide

Says it all. The Left has always been about having power over humanity and controlling it.

[narses]

Pope Leo XIII was anti-Walmart? Wow. Do tell, exactly what part of Rerum Novarum is it that you read as anti-Walmart? You have read it, yes?

As for 'stagnate', make up your mind. You said "WMT has had growth,.." and now you say they are stagnate! Stock prices are set by complex markets. Shoppers keep BUYING from Walmart. They are now the LARGEST grocer in America. Stagnate indeed!

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

Translation of the entire article:

"Waaaaaaa! Wal-Mart doesn't contribute to socialist causes so they're evil!"

Sam Walton started his business from scratch. I agree with him when he says undeserving strangers shouldn't be helped. He did it, so can anyone else!

[staytrue]

Walmart annual sales is 400 billion dollars. We only import 280 billion from China. So even if Walmart was the only company in the entire US that imported anything from China (obviously not true), Walmart would still sell 120 billion from somewhere else.

[10mm]

I refuse to defend Wal-Mart as long as they do things like the General Counsel of Wal-Mart requiring that every law firm it does business with have a minority lawyer on the "team" that does the Wal Mart legal work.

I think that greedy lawyers are an enormous threat to our Republic. The fact that Walmart is making them eat their own sh*t is very satisfying.

[narses]

Is Wal-Mart Good for America?
The campaign against the company is about union politics.

Saturday, December 3, 2005 12:01 a.m.

It is a testament to the public-relations success of the anti-Wal-Mart campaign that the question above is even being asked.

By any normal measure, Wal-Mart's business ought to be noncontroversial. It sells at low cost, albeit in mind-boggling quantities, the quotidian products that huge numbers of Americans evidently want to buy--from household goods to clothes to food.

Wal-Mart employs about 1.3 million people, about 1% of the American work force. Its sales, at around $300 billion a year, are equal to 2.5% of U.S. gross domestic product. It is not, however, an especially profitable company. Its net profit margins, at about 3.5% of revenue, are broadly in line with the rest of the retail industry. In fiscal 2004, Microsoft made more money than Wal-Mart on just one-eighth of the sales.

The company's success and size, then, do not rest on monopoly profits or price-gouging behavior. It simply sells things people will buy at small markups and, as in the old saw, makes it up on volume. We draw your attention to that total revenue number because, in a sense, it tells you most of what you need to know about Wal-Mart. You may believe, as do service-worker unions and a clutch of coastal elites--many of whom, we'd wager, have never set foot in a Wal-Mart--that Wal-Mart "exploits" workers who can't say no to low wages and poor benefits. You might also accept the canard that Wal-Mart drives good local businesses into the ground, although both of these allegations are more myth than reality.

But even if you buy into the myths, there's no getting around the fact that somewhere out there, millions of people are spending billions of dollars on what Wal-Mart puts on its shelves. No one is making them do it. To the extent that mom-and-pop stores are threatened by Wal-Mart, it's because the same people who supposedly so value their Main Street hardware store find that Wal-Mart's selection, or prices, or parking lot--something about it--is preferable. Wal-Mart can't make mom and pop shut down the shop any more than it can make customers walk through the doors or pull out their wallets. You don't sell $300 billion a year worth of anything without doing something right.

What about the workers? In response to long-running criticisms about its pay and benefits, Wal-Mart's CEO, Lee Scott, recently called on the government to raise the minimum wage. But as this page noted at the time, Wal-Mart's average starting wage is already nearly double the national minimum of $5.15 an hour.

So raising it would have little effect on Wal-Mart, but calling for it to be raised anyway must have struck someone in the company as a good way to appease its political critics. (Bad call: Senator Ted Kennedy quickly pocketed the concession and kept denouncing the company.) The fact is that the company's starting hourly wages not only aren't as bad as portrayed, but for many workers those wages are only a start. Some 70% of Wal-Mart's executives have worked their way up from the company's front lines.

The company has also recently increased its health-care options for employees on the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder. Starting in January, one of those options will be a high-deductible health savings account, which is a great way to insure yourself if you're relatively young, relatively healthy and yet want to protect against the onset of some catastrophic illness. Mr. Kennedy, who recently called Wal-Mart one of the most "antiworker" companies around, has been a chief opponent of these pro-worker, pro-market health insurance vehicles.

But suppose Wal-Mart did look more like the company its detractors would like it to be, with overpaid workers, union work rules, and correspondingly higher prices on goods. It would not only be a less attractive place to shop, and hence a considerably smaller company. It would drive up the cost of living for the millions who shop there, thus hurting those in the bottom half of the income-distribution tables that Wal-Mart's critics claim to be speaking for. One might expect this fact to trouble the anti-Wal-Mart forces, except that their agenda is very different from what they profess it to be.

As our Holman W. Jenkins Jr. pointed out in a recent column, the vanguard of the Wal-Mart haters is composed of unions that have for decades kept retail wages and prices artificially high, especially in the supermarket business. Those unions have had next to no success organizing Wal-Mart employees and see Wal-Mart's push into groceries as a direct threat to their market position. And on that one score, they may be right.

But seen it that light, it becomes clear that much of the criticism is simply a form of special-interest lobbying in socially conscious drag. And why an outside observer should favor the interests of unionized supermarket employees over those of Wal-Mart shoppers and employees is far from clear (unless you're a politician who gets union contributions).

Any company as successful as Wal-Mart will invariably run afoul of such vested interests. It is in the nature of the rise of a new giant on the scene that it disrupts established ways of doing things and in the process upsets established players. So it was with Standard Oil at the beginning of the 20th century, IBM in the middle and Microsoft at the end of the century. Wal-Mart, perhaps because it restricted itself to towns of less than 15,000 people as a matter of policy into the 1990s, at first avoided and later seemed blindsided by the attacks that have come its way.

The company has never been shy about defending its interests. But some of its recent ripostes--such as Mr. Scott's call for hiking the minimum wage or its gestures toward fighting global warming--seem to be addressed to the wrong audience.

Its customers don't need to be told what they like about Wal-Mart. But the company's management would do well to bear in mind that it is those millions of shoppers, and not the elites with which the company has sometimes of late been seen to be currying favor, that have made the company what it is.

[sam_paine]

They have been fighting to keep Wal-Mart out...and...they are actively working to attract a Costco.

Well well well....guess which company also happens to be a Biiiig DNC supporter!?!?!? Maybe someone can help me find the link of the two companies contributions in the recent presidential elections.

[staytrue]

after WWII when America had a monopoly on the manufacturing trade, employers could pass union demands along to the customer in the form of higher prices

BINGO, Unions need a monopoly because non union businesses will kill them every time. That is why Public Unions are the only ones left. They have a guaranteed monopoly.