We have a category called "Wal-Mart," but it appears that we need to revise that to read "Walmart." Walmart is getting a spanking new look for its brand. Behold the new logo:

Hmm. Walmart is like a sunny day ...

Look at the evolution of Walmart's logo, and you can see an echo of the first logo (1962-64).

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Apparently Wal-Mart’s campaign to encourage its customers to buy compact fluorescent light bulbs has paid off. Today Wal-Mart announced that it has surpassed its goal to sell 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs by the end of this year. In fact, Wal-Mart’s goal in its "Change a Light. Change the World." campaign is to sell 100 million more by the end of 2008. At about $2 to $3 each, the bulbs are at least eight times more expensive than an ordinary light bulb. However, the bulbs preserve energy resources because apparently one bulb keeps half a ton of greenhouse gas out of the air. Moreover, the bulbs last longer, saving customers money over the long run. The bulbs also reduce electricity costs--100 million bulbs saves about $3 billion in electricity costs.  With all that going for them, one would think they would have been selling without Wal-Mart's campaign.  However, these light bulbs have been around for years and companies have not experienced significant success in selling them or otherwise getting people to purchase them as an environmentally-friendly alternative.  According to one source, in the beginning of 2007, only six percent of households used them. But Wal-Mart launched an aggressive campaign to change that, and its announcement today suggest that the campaign has been successful.  So whether just a clever marketing ploy to spruce up its image or a genuine effort to preserve the environment (or a little of both), Wal-Mart has certainly used its resources in a way that has had a positive impact on the environment.

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We like to follow Wal-Mart goings-on here at the Glom.  Usually it's about downward price pressure in specific geographic or product markets that Wal-Mart chooses to enter, whether it's good or bad, and community responses. 

Now an interesting new paper has come out describing another Wal-Mart effect, this time on global environmental governance.  The paper, by Michael Vandenbergh at Vanderbilt, describes how Wal-Mart and other large firms may plausibly be improving global environmental governance by imposing environmental requirements on their suppliers.  Responding to social, economic, and regulatory pressures, large importers are in effect exporting industrial country environmental standards to developing countries via private contract, a move that may help fill regulatory gaps that result from global trade.  An interesting read.

Here's the abstract:

This Article argues that networks of private contracts serve a public regulatory function in the global environmental arena. These networks fill the regulatory gaps created when global trade increases the exploitation of global commons resources and shifts production to exporting countries with lax environmental standards. As critics of trade liberalization have noted, public responses often are inadequate to address the attendant environmental harms. This Article uses empirical data to examine how private contracting regulates firm behavior, focusing on supply-chain contracting. The Article shows that more than half of the largest firms in eight retail and industrial sectors impose environmental requirements on their domestic and foreign suppliers. This contracting, which the Article terms "the new Wal-Mart effect," reduces externalities by translating a complex mix of social, economic, and legal incentives for environmental protection into private contractual requirements. After demonstrating that private environmental contracting is an important part of global environmental governance, the Article examines the efficacy and accountability of this regime. The Article concludes that the private contracting regime often is preferable to the alternatives: lax national and international regulation of firms in many exporting countries, and markets that lack private environmental contracting. Finding much promise in the private contracting regime, the Article concludes by suggesting new strategies for governments, nongovernmental organizations, and firms.

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Last summer Al Gore praised Wal-Mart's environmental initiatives, stating:

The message from Wal-Mart today to the rest of the business community is, there need not be any conflict between the environment and the economy. We will find the way not only to reconcile (those), but to find new profits and new opportunities as we do the right thing.

Today comes news of a plan to outfit 22 Wal-Mart stores in California and Hawaii with solar panels. (W$J) The panels will provide up to 30% of the energy for the stores. This is a pilot project designed to test the viability of solar energy in other Wal-Mart locations. And it is supported by tax incentives:

California and Hawaii have other appeals for solar panels beside abundant sunshine. Solar power typically costs more than conventional forms of energy based on fossil fuels, but those two states provide generous rebates because they are trying to get 20% of their energy from renewable resources by 2020.

Wal-Mart, Bentonville, Ark., declined to quantify its anticipated savings from the pilot program other than to say they will register "as soon as the first day of operation." What's more, Wal-Mart, not its solar providers, will retain the renewable-energy credits generated by the program. The credits recognize the value of producing energy from renewable resources like solar power that don't create greenhouse-gas emissions such as carbon dioxide. They could be valuable if the Democratic-controlled Congress introduces emission caps and such credits can be traded.

There are big subsidies for solar installations in some states, and these programs can cut the effective cost of a project by half. In the case of the 22 stores, Wal-Mart is buying the output of the solar panels sitting on its rooftops. But the vendors -- BP PLC subsidiary BP Solar, SunEdison LLC and SunPower Corp. subsidiary PowerLight -- said they are receiving a federal tax credit amounting to 30% of each installation's cost, plus ratepayer-funded rebates paid by utilities and other incentives. After all the subsidies, electricity produced by solar panels can end up cheaper than that from conventional sources.

As Conglomerate readers know, I am not inclined to bash Wal-Mart, so don't take it as a criticism of the company when I say that this is not "corporate social responsibility." This is good business. Cost savings + positive public relations = no brainer.

That said, Al Gore's feel-good notion that "there need not be any conflict between the environment and the economy" is dangerous because it leads many people to assume that clean air and clean water are costless. The obvious implication of Gore's reasoning is that corporate directors and officers are evil incarnate or wildly incompetent. How else could one understand environmental degradation in a world where the environment and the economy are not in conflict? In the case of Wal-Mart's new solar panels, the costs of moving away from fossil fuels will be borne, in part, by taxpayers. There is no free lunch.

These are the sorts of thoughts that prompted me to write The Dystopian Potential of Corporate Law, in which I respond to Kent Greenfield's call for corporate governance reforms that encourage greater corporate social responsibility:

The crucial point of departure for this section is the following incontrovertible fact: Professor Greenfield's vision of utopia would require boards of directors to make decisions that sacrifice potential shareholder value in favor of value for non-shareholder constituencies. When boards of directors are able to enhance employee welfare, make the environment cleaner, or improve human rights throughout the world without impairing shareholder value, they often do it. This is not "corporate social responsibility," but good management. And the failure to pursue such strategies would be a problem of managerial incompetence, not a problem of improper incentives.

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Josh Wright calls for more than soundbites on Wal-Mart:

A welfare increase of 6.5% for the lowest income quintile is enormous. How many government programs create that kind of welfare benefit? Can you name one? If there are serious arguments to be launched against Wal-Mart, and surely some of these politicians are serious (right?), they must embrace the reality that Wal-Mart has produced enormous benefits for Americans as a whole and especially lower and middle-lower class Americans.

You will want to read the whole post, all the way to the end, so that you can see Jason Furman's defense of Wal-Mart as a "progressive success story."

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the Wal-Mart debate is that Hillary Clinton, as a former director of Wal-Mart, is so well positioned to advance the debate. Instead, she parrots the same old talking points. Nice display of leadership.

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Walmart has partnered with Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox and Universal to sell digital movies and television shows over the internet. According to the NYT, "Wal-Mart says it has used its clout to pull together all the right Hollywood players, create an easy-to-use Web site with Hewlett-Packard and develop a broad library of videos." About that website, this is what it looked like this morning:

Well, I am sure that it will be easy to use once they get it out of beta. It's supposed to look like this:

As for television shows, we are told that "Wal-Mart will cull titles from networks big and small, like Comedy Central, CW, FX, Logo, MTV and Nickelodeon." Notice that ABC, CBS and NBC are conspicuously missing.

Prices for movies will range from $12.88 to $19.88 on the day of the DVD release. Older movies will start at $7.50, and TV shows at $1.96 an episode.

Reportedly, Walmart has agreed that download prices would remain "comparable" to DVD prices, and they do not have an exclusive relationship with any of the movie studios. This means that Walmart will be competing with more established sites. iTunes carries movies from only Disney and Paramount, but Movielink is owned by five of the studios and CinemaNow offers movies from all six major studios. Amazon's Unbox lacks only Disney films. Do we have any reason to believe that this will be more successful than Walmart's foray into music downloads?

UPDATE: It appears that Walmart's site works properly if you are using Internet Explorer. The garbled screenshot above was taken on Firefox. HP is touting its "new business" (Video Merchant Services), which developed Walmart's site, but who develops sites that don't work with Firefox? (Note: Movielink also doesn't run on Firefox.) This just reinforces the image of Walmart as tech-unsavvy.

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Wednesday the 4th Circuit upheld a ruling that struck down a Maryland law passed last year that would have required Wal-Mart to spend at least 8% of its payroll on health care benefits for its employees. The 4th Circuit said the law was pre-empted by ERISA.

On its face, the Maryland law did not apply solely to Wal-Mart, but to all corporations with 10,000 or more employees. In reality, only four corporations fell within that category and three of the four were either exempt or had already met the law’s thresholds. Which left Wal-Mart the last corporation standing.

The 4th Circuits ruling, however, enables Wal-Mart to avoid Maryland’s efforts at regulating its benefits, while making it difficult for other states to follow Maryland’s lead. Indeed, after the law passed in Maryland, efforts began to replicate the law elsewhere. However, those efforts may have proved difficult even without the 4th Circuit’s ruling. The narrow focus of Maryland’s law not only assured its success in Maryland, but also underscored the difficulties it would face in other states. These kind of “Wal-Mart” only laws have a better chance of success simply because they may not get as much resistance from the business community. However, since many other states were seeking to cast a wider net, the resistance to legislative action likely would have increased.

On a broader note, this ruling is another round in our “Wal-Mart vs. the world” battle. On one side of the ledger is the problem of Wal-Mart as “target” and even “scapegoat.” Indeed, Wal-Mart’s spokesperson and its supporters claim that most of these laws are not aimed at preventing illegality on the part of Wal-Mart, but rather at seeking to hold Wal-Mart accountable for addressing societal problems. On the other side, of course, are the many groups that claim to be harmed by Wal-Mart’s actions. Maryland legislators got a lot of support from the public and unions who claimed that the law was necessary to ensure that large corporations pay their fair share of health care costs. Maryland also got support from businesses arguing that Wal-Mart’s policies put corporations in the difficult position of either downgrading their own health care benefits or facing a competitive disadvantage. I have to say it is hard to keep score in this battle because while Wal-Mart seems to be losing ground with respect to public opinion, rulings such as this one seem to be a big victory for the company many people love to hate.

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That's from Lee Scott, who is commenting on Wal-Mart's plans to promote "compact fluorescent lamps" ... whether we want them or not!

This is a tough sell -- consumers think the bulbs are expensive (it's true that the initial cost is higher, but the operating costs are much lower) and ugly (I think they are sort of snazzy) -- so Wal-Mart has pursued a new strategy:

But to reach 100 million, Wal-Mart has to do much more — and that, executives concede, is where the biggest challenges rest. In the fall, the company began reaching out to competing retailers, Internet companies and even filmmakers.

The goal was to turn its sales campaign into a broader cultural movement.

One proposal, headed by Lawrence Bender, who produced Al Gore' s 2006 documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," is to create a Web site that would track sales of compact fluorescent bulbs at major retailers like Walgreen's and Target. The result would be a real-time map, with data collected by a third party, showing how much Americans have saved by using the energy-efficient bulbs.

[Andy Ruben, Wal-Mart’s  vice president for strategy and sustainability,] said such a map "helps consumers see this as something bigger than buying a bulb."

At the same time, Google and Yahoo are in talks with Wal-Mart about how to use their search engines to promote the bulbs.

But Home Depot and Lowe's balked at the idea of cooperating with their larger rival. "We don't think we need an organization like that to sell more CFLs," said Ron Jarvis, the vice president of environmental innovation at Home Depot, using the bulb’s industry nickname.

Notice that the Wal-Mart spokesman is "vice president for strategy and sustainability." This is an interesting strategic gambit for Wal-Mart. The potential payoff lies not only, or even primarily, in selling more light bulbs -- after all, Wal-Mart was selling plenty of light bulbs without this new initiative -- but in improving its public image, thus paving the way for the growth that has become so challenging of late. Will this sort of instrumental social responsibility carry the day with Wal-Mart's critics? Or must we have the sense that a company's convictions transcend market forces?

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I have been cramming for my Wal-mart panel next week at the AALS Annual Meeting, and I found a case study entitled "Corporations and Social Costs: The Wal-Mart Case Study" by Benedict Sheehy. Mostly routine stuff, but this argument about consumerism caught me off guard:

Wal-Mart's approach of increasing by supplying goods in large or bulk size creates its own special set of problems. For example, Wal-Mart decided to use pickles to create an impression of incredibly cheap prices. It pressured a supplier of high quality pickles (with threats to discontinue business with them) to produce gallon jars of pickles for less than $3. The net result was a dramatic increase in sales at very low margins, increased demand on farmers and all pickle producers, undermining its high quality pickle market it had built up over the years, and eventually contributing to the supplier's bankruptcy. Perhaps worst of all, as an executive at the former   pickle supplier observed: "They'd eat a quarter of a jar and throw the thing away when they got moldy. A family can't eat them fast enough."

This problem--promoting over-consumption in a world of limited resources, currently reeling under the environmental costs of its consumption habits--is nothing short of moronic. Americans are the most over-weight people on the planet, spend more money per capita on diets, consume more goods per capita than anyone else on the planet, and Wal-Mart's strategy, effectively, is to promote further over-consumption by under-pricing more goods. Basic economic theory indicates that when goods are under priced they are over consumed. We need look no further than Wal-Mart to see the truth of this principle. While Wal-Mart is not the creator of consumerism, its dominance creates a large responsibility to inform consumers about the real costs. By under-pricing, Wal-Mart is misinforming the consumer encouraging over-consumption, and to do so in the planet's current state is nothing less than perverse. Because of its market dominance, a strong argument can be made for its bearing considerable corporate responsibility to inform consumers about costs by pricing correctly.

After reading Dan's post about the Ethical Practice of Legal Scholarship, I am reluctant to comment on this passage without consulting Mr. Sheehy in advance. Nevertheless, I trust that Conglomerate readers can draw their own conclusions.

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It's old news that Wal-Mart's low-price strategy hinges in part on its ability to wring volume discounts from suppliers.  However, the next target of this strategy may be the drug companies, which may generate some interesting debates over the Wal-Mart effect.  Wal-Mart has announced that for some 300 generic drugs, it will be selling a month's supply for $4.  While the pricing is still above cost, it's far less than prices charged by the big pharmacy chains, according to the Economist (sorry, subscription required, I think).  Target has said it will match Wal-Mart's pricing.  Walgreen's and CVS say they won't (AZ Republic).  Hard to know whom to root for in that match up.

Further on Wal-Mart and health . . .

the company is switching to high deductible health insurance for new employees beginning next year (again, according to the Economist).  The trade off, of course, is low premiums.  It's an interesting plan. Premiums as low as $11/ month, but the insured covers the first $1,000 in annual health care expenses (or $3,000 for a family).  But the insured gets 3 doctor visits and 3 prescription drugs before the deductible applies.  According to the company, the 3 doctor visits will cover most employees, who will therefore benefit from the lower premiums.  Critics argue that this just leaves sicker workers with higher health care costs.

Now, I don't know how to feel about that.  Should healthy workers be forced to subsidize less healthy workers?  More generally, is there a principled approach to risk pooling?  Can markets work it out?  My car insurer cares very much about my zip code, and while I'm otherwise demographically a very good risk, my premiums for a 10-year-old Volvo are ridiculous because I live in a big city.  Over the course of my lifetime, I will undoubtedly pay more into that pool than I take out.

In any event, the subtitle to the Economist article may only be a mild exaggeration:  "Health-care policy may now be decided in Bentonville."

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Let me jump on Gordon's Wal-Mart bandwagon for a minute.  Big news in the organic world is that Wal-Mart has gone green over the past year, and now it will carry organic milk (NYT).  Organic milk farmers must be whooping it up over this development, right?  Not exactly.  Wal-Mart's entry into the market has merely accelerated the corporatizing of organic food, which critics argue has lowered organic standards and may drive down prices for suppliers (BW).  The dairy that supplies Walmart (and also Safeway, Costco, Target, and Wild Oats) is under fire from organic activists and competing organic dairies for cutting organic corners and "diluting the principles of organic agriculture."  Its cows do not spend significant time roaming pastures and eating fresh grass.  Instead, these cows live on a high grain diet.  According to competing organic farmers, grass-fed cows produce more nutritious milk.  Whole Foods won't buy organic milk from Walmart's supplier.

Now, this raises an interesting conundrum . . .

Demand for organic milk is strongly increasing--sales last year were up 25% from the year before.  But higher standards must mean higher prices as well.  Wal-Mart has made no bones about its desire to bring organic foods to the masses.  Other giant food companies are also exerting downward pressure on organic standards, as corporate food lobbyists (for Kraft, Dole, and others) have gotten Congress to weaken some rules on organics. 

Should we cheer or deride these efforts?  Should organic foods remain "pure," but only within the reach of more affluent shoppers?  Or can some corners be cut in order to make healthier foods more affordable and thus more widely available?  At some level, this is just another manifestation of the tension that is Wal-Mart --achieving lower prices but paying its workers less and driving local competitors out of business.  OTOH, for organic foods, there may be a way around this specific conflict (which doesn't address Wal-Mart's labor practices or effects on competing retailers).

The fight over organics seems to me essentially a labeling or "truth-in-advertising"  problem.  Perhaps an "organic" either-or is too restrictive, given the probability that consumer demand is more nuanced.  Perhaps organic grading would be useful, in the same way the USDA grades beef.  Let consumers decide.

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The front page of the NYT website featured two stories about Wal-Mart early this morning:

The first story is obviously big news. Wal-Mart is hoping to purchase Trust-Mart, a chain of hypermarkets ("giant stores that sell a wide range of general merchandise and food") in China. The purchase would double Wal-Mart's presence in China and would place Wal-Mart in contention for the title of largest retail chain in the country.

That second story is about 100 workers at a Wal-Mart store in Hialeah Gardens, Florida who were protesting a rollback of their working hours. The resolution:

Wal-Mart officials said the top manager at the store had violated company policy by reducing hours across the board, instead of doing it the usual way by reducing hours here and there to take into account the needs of particular departments and shifts.

What constitutes news about Wal-Mart? Everything!

At some point during the past few years, Wal-Mart became more than a company. It became the embodiment of capitalism. As a result, debates about workers, international trade, community development, health care, corporate social responsibility, etc. all occur in microcosm in Wal-Mart. Unfortunately for Wal-Mart, its symbolic value makes it a prime target for anyone wanting to score points against the status quo.

On a related note, I finally watched Frontline's well-traveled feature "Is Wal-Mart Good for America?" (which is available online). I am planning to write something academic about Wal-Mart and its critics, and that may be a more appropriate place to evaluate Hedrick Smith's production. For the present, I will say only that I found the piece disappointingly shallow (with startling revelations like the fact that Wal-Mart attempts to lure unwary customers into the store by using heavily discounted "opening price points") and surprisingly xenophobic (it focused almost as much on China as on Wal-Mart).

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Last week Wal-Mart announced a voter registration drive for its employees, apparently the largest such drive by a private employer.  Wal-Mart is sending registration forms to its employees with prepaid postage.  Wal-Mart also is allowing its employees three hours of paid leave to visit the polls if their shifts do no allow for such time off. 

Of course their registration drive was met with criticism.  Wal-Mart's director of media relations does not deny that Wal-Mart's voter registration drive was prompted by recent criticism from politicians who have taken aim at Wal-Mart and its policies.  Others point out that Wal-Mart often has hampered the efforts of independent groups to conduct registration drives on Wal-Mart properties.  Regardless of the motivation, I think you have to be happy with any corporation's effort to get out the vote.  Arguably one of the reasons why Wal-Mart gets so much attention is because it is so large and hence its policies have a broad impact.  From that perspective, we should appreciate when Wal-Mart launches a program that has a positive impact on its employees and the larger community, and hope that its efforts prompt other large employers to do the same.

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Today's W$J has a front-page story on Wal-Mart's woes in Boston, and the story refers to a new website called "Big Box Tool Kit" (launched today), which offers information for people who are "working to stop or prevent sprawling big-box development" in their communities. The website is maintained by  the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which was founded in 1974 and is based in Minnesota. Though the Big Box Tool Kit does not distinguish among big-box retailers, the map of communities that are "fighting a big-box project" reveals the heavy focus on Wal-Mart (W), as opposed to Home Depot (H) or Target (T).

The poster child for this sort of activity in central Massachusetts is Arthur P. DiGeronimo Jr.:

Mr. DiGeronimo, 54, is a native of Leominster, a city of 41,000 in the rolling hills of central Massachusetts. Business-savvy and well-spoken, he is a community fixture, having run a grocery-store chain started by his Italian immigrant family until its sale in 2004. He now owns a sound and video equipment company.

Mr. DiGeronimo says Wal-Mart's arrival will hurt the area's nine grocery stores and half-dozen department stores. Driving through the city in his pickup truck, he argues that Wal-Mart won't improve residents' well-being. "It is a question of the quality of life that's become important for a lot of communities," he says.

Another example:

Ms. Harvey and her husband John, both 35, didn't actively oppose the Leominster store plan, even though their house is technically within city limits. The second site, by contrast, is directly across from their home. Ms. Harvey says she used to shop at Wal-Mart when her children were small but stopped after encountering Wal-Mart critiques, such as the documentary, "Is Wal-Mart Good for America?" Wal-Mart "doesn't fit the character of the town," Ms. Harvey says.

I am attempting to steer clear of glib cynicism about the anti-Wal-Mart movement, but it's hard to ignore the opportunistic use of anti-Wal-Mart rhetoric by a potential competitor and a NIMBY.

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Thanks to a tip from my student, Ray Ro, I just watched Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott on Charlie Rose. They touch on all of the hot-button issues here, with special emphasis on Wal-Mart's new environmental initiatives.

Speaking of environmental initiatives, Wal-Mart announced today that it will use its purchasing clout to push for packaging changes through the Wal-Mart Sustainable Packaging Value Network:

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. today announced plans to measure its 60,000 worldwide suppliers on their ability to develop packaging and conserve natural resources. This initiative, scheduled to begin in 2008, is projected to reduce overall packaging by five percent.  The announcement came at the conclusion of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City....

On November 1, 2006, Wal-Mart will introduce a packaging scorecard to more than 2,000 private label suppliers. This is a tool that will allow Wal-Mart buyers to have all the information about packaging alternatives or more sustainable packaging materials in one place, allowing them to make better purchasing decisions.

On February 1, 2007, tools and processes will be made available to all of the company’s global suppliers.  For 12 months, these suppliers will learn and share results within this process.  And beginning in 2008, Wal-Mart will measure and recognize the entire worldwide supply base for using less packaging, utilizing more effective materials in packaging, and sourcing these materials more efficiently through a packaging scorecard.

Richard Branson was at the Clinton Global Initiative, too, committing an estimated $3 billion over 10 years to renewable energy initiatives.

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As I have mentioned, I am on a panel at the AALS meeting in January discussing Wal-Mart, and I have assembled a collection of Wal-Mart books in preparation for the event. (Note that I am planning to say some nice things about Wal-Mart, though I am not interested in being Wal-Mart's advocate. The books about Wal-Mart are overwhelmingly negative.)

Yesterday, I started reading The Bully of Bentonville by Business Week reporter Anthony Bianco, and I have taken the title of this post from his first chapter. My plan is to catalog the major complaints against Wal-Mart and, in time, to subject those complaints to more rigorous analysis than is possible in a soundbite. For the moment, I am just collecting complaints, and I thought I would share some thoughts as I go along. Of course, you are most welcome to add thoughts, as I am looking to educate myself.

My first entry relates to Wal-Mart's effect on competing firms. Bianco writes:

What in an economist's language sounds like a bloodless program of national self-improvement is in fact a brutal, Darwinian struggle spilling blood in every shopping mall and factory. Failure to measure up to the demanding efficiency standards set by Wal-Mart has crippled thousands of businesses -- not just corner grocers and family hardware stores, but also the billion-dollar likes of Kmart, Toys 'R' Us, and Winn-Dixie.

When I read anything, I try to use the principle of charity, so I will state up front that I know Bianco is packing a lot into this paragraph, and some unpacking would probably make some of his claims less ridiculous than they seem on their face. But I come at this having studied Kmart in the mid-1990s, and I have little sympathy for the fact that Kmart had difficulty keeping pace with Wal-Mart's "demanding efficiency standards." Kmart's stores were older than Wal-Mart's, and Kmart had not mainained their stores very well. If you visited a Kmart in the late 1980s and early 1990s, you probably remember them as dimly lit and grungy. Moreover, Kmart did not have an effective system of tracking inventory, so they often ran out of items that customers wanted. Wal-Mart did us all a favor.

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As I have mentioned previously, I am slated to speak on a panel about Wal-Mart in the January meeting of the AALS. So this afternoon -- on my last free day prior to the start of the fall semester -- I visited Borders to check out the cottage industry of books relating to Wal-Mart. I ended up buying several of them, though there appears to be lots of redundancy.

By the way, just for fun I searched the journals and law reviews database (JLR) in Westlaw and found 5799 documents mentioning Wal-Mart!

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In January I am on a panel discussing Wal-Mart. My assignment is to provide some balance to the panel on the pro-Wal-Mart side, but I won't be taking my cues from Andrew Young:

Young was asked whether he was concerned Wal-Mart causes smaller, mom-and-pop stores to close. "Well, I think they should; they ran the `mom and pop' stores out of my neighborhood," the paper quoted Young as saying. "But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs; very few black people own these stores."

Yikes! Young has since resigned from Working Families for Wal-Mart, which is hoping to boost Wal-Mart's public image.

HT Ideoblog.

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Wal-Mart has decided to exit from Germany, eight years after entering the market. German retailers beat Wal-Mart with low prices. From the W$J:

After Wal-Mart acquired two small, struggling German retail chains eight years ago, it ran up against several problems. It found itself being underpriced by local retailers called hard discounters, such as Aldi. German shoppers flock to these stores, which sell a limited selection -- often 850 to 1,000 items, compared with 100,000 at Wal-Mart -- and stock mainly their own store brands.

Some 80% of German consumers are about 20 minutes from an Aldi, according to Nestle's research. The hard discounters account for about 40% of the German retail market, compared with Wal-Mart's share of less than 2%, analysts say.

German shoppers are accustomed to buying merchandise strictly based on price, German retail consultants say. They are willing to buy laundry detergent at one store and then go to another to get a better price on paper towels. That behavior is called "basket splitting." It is the antithesis of what American shoppers like: one-stop shopping. A big plank of Wal-Mart's strategy in the U.S. and elsewhere is getting shoppers to turn to it for an increasingly wide array of goods.

According to the article, this is not the only international problem for Wal-Mart. It's worth a read.

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