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Wal-Mart Fights Back

Wal-Mart Fights Back
Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005

Hiring high-powered former presidential advisers and setting up a public relations "war room," embattled Wal-Mart has gone on the offensive against a new documentary that unabashedly seeks to bring the retail giant to its knees.

"Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" debuted this month in theaters across America. The film portrays Wal-Mart destroying mom-and-pop businesses, paying such low wages that many employees rely on public assistance, and discriminating against its female workers.

In the discounter's biggest nightmare, the documentary features a series of shots of abandoned Main Streets, vacant store after vacant store, with Bruce Springsteen's mournful version of "This Land Is Your Land" playing in the background.

A training coordinator recalls being made to clean the bathroom as a regular chore because she was the only woman in her department, while a black man remembers racial epithets and lynching jokes.

Reportedly, the film is part of a wider anti-Wal-Mart movement. Backed by big labor unions, opponents use rallies and Web sites to hammer home how they believe the company treats their employees unfairly.

The first PR return salvo that blasted forth from the Wal-Mart war room was a 10-page press kit for reporters that defends the company's business practices and details the company's grievances with the film.

There quickly followed an approved alternative film - "Why Wal-Mart Works: And Why That Drives Some People C-r-a-z-y." The film arrived on DVD on November 12, with Hanover House distributing 100,000 copies of the film to bookstores and online retailers.

The simple theme of the alternative film: nearly 140 million people shop at Wal-Mart each week, and they enjoy and appreciate the low prices.

"The price is very good on items in Wal-Mart," says one customer in a cheery vignette, "and you have a variety of things to choose from."

But the Wal-Mart defense is not all the stuff of Madison Ave. Good citizen Wal-Mart is lobbying on Capitol Hill, pushing for a higher minimum wage, and introducing a new employee-friendly health care plan.

"Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" was made by Robert Greenwald, a junior Hollywood mogul whose last two films were also documentaries - one featuring a bevy of national security experts waxing on about Bush administration "lies" on the road to war in Iraq, and the second knocking the Fox News Channel as pro-Bush.

Whatever fodder there may be in these two aforementioned screen gems, the Wal-Mart PR war room has chosen to focus on Greenwald's 1980 Olivia Newton-John flop, "Xanadu" - reprinting old reviews that panned the film.

Located at the company headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, the war room has been in overdrive. Helping to crack the whip are none other than former Reagan presidential adviser Michael K. Deaver - and Leslie Dach, a media consultant for former president Bill Clinton.

Also on the PR dream team, according to a report in the New York Times: Jonathan Adashek, director of national delegate strategy for John Kerry; David White, who helped manage the 1998 re-election of Rep. Nancy Johnson, a Connecticut Republican; Terry Nelson, the national political director of the 2004 Bush campaign; Paul Blank, former political director for the Howard Dean presidential bid, and Chris Kofinis, who designed the DraftWesleyClark.com campaign.

The mission: polish the tarnished image that is being blamed for Wal-Mart's stock price falling 27 percent since 2000, and sales growth at stores that have been open for more than a year slowing to an average of 3.5 percent a month this year, compared with 6.3 percent at Target.

Also on the agenda for the war room is reversing the nettlesome resistance to new urban stores in prime locations such as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.

As part of its counterattack, Wal-Mart has introduced a line of fashions called "Metro 7," designed to be appealing to the well-heeled urban set.

But the bread and butter is still the old-fashioned press release and sound bite:

"I personally think that Wal-Mart ... has benefited more poor and working-class Americans - more than any other institution I can think of," offers Ron Galloway, the pro-Wal-Mart film's producer.

"The average consumer ... has been able to see a savings of $1,280 per year by getting the exact same goods at Wal-Mart versus other retailers and that's really the fundamental reason why Wal-Mart works," pronounces Eric Parkinson, president of Hanover House.

"Instead of presenting a well-documented, objective assessment of Wal-Mart's impact on the community, Greenwald has amassed an array of advocacy, conjecture and misinformation contrived to fuel his anti-Wal-Mart agenda," a chain spokesman writes in a statement to the media.

Meanwhile, the rival film, "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," grinds away before customer-audiences across the country. It's chock full of head-swiveling alleged factoids like:

# WAL-MART Drives Down Retail Wages $3 BILLION Every Year

# ALABAMA: 3,864 Children of WAL-MART Employees are Enrolled in Medicaid

# ARKANSAS: 3,971 WAL-MART Workers on Public Assistance

# WAL-MART Costs Taxpayers $1,557,000,000 to Support its Employees

# WAL-MART Currently Faces Lawsuits in Thirty-One States for Wage and Hour Abuses

Wal-Mart PR warriors address each and every charge, and offer a few factoids to support their own claims, including:

# Wal-Mart saved each American household an average of $2,329 last year, according to an independent study by the economic research firm Global Insight. That's almost half the average tuition at a public four-year university.

# Wal-Mart had a net positive impact in the form of a .9 percent increase in real wages.

# The retail chain was responsible for the creation of 210,000 jobs last year, accounting for 10 percent of the national total.

# A paper co-authored by a researcher from the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that food prices at Wal-Mart are up to 48 percent less than prices in supermarkets and other conventional retail outlets.

# The presence of a Wal-Mart increases local commercial property tax collections by between $350,000 and about $1.3 million. Also, Wal-Mart collected more than $1.2 billion in state and local sales taxes for communities last year.

# In January 2006, Wal-Mart will provide medical insurance to more than 1 million people, with coverage available for as little as $11 per month for individuals and 30 cents a day for children.

# In the fiscal year ending in January 2005, Wal-Mart spent approximately $4.2 billion on benefits, including medical and dental insurance, profit sharing, stock purchases and 401(k) plans.

# In that fiscal year, cash donations to charities through Wal-Mart Stores and the Wal-Mart & SAM'S CLUB Foundation exceeded $170 million, making Wal-Mart the largest corporate giver in the U.S.

# Wal-Mart purchases goods from more than 61,000 U.S. suppliers and supports more than 3 million supplier jobs.

On its Web site, Wal-Mart quotes no less of an economics guru than Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett:

"You can add it all up and they (Wal-Mart) have contributed to the financial well-being of the American public more than any institution I can think of."

There's little time to rest in the war room.


LINK: http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/11/16/171129.shtml