On the one hand, you almost have to admire Wal-Mart’s brazen disregard for its public image. I mean, the company regularly pouts very publicly, and it doesn’t seem to mind that it looks like a petulant three-year-old. If it weren’t so off-putting, it would be kind of cute. (In one notorious case, Wal-Mart employees voted to organize; a pouty corporate office closed their store in response. In another instance, a group of Wal-Mart butchers voted to form a union. Their store switched to pre-packaged meat and fired them.)
[...]
This time, they’ve banned the sale of the Pensacola News Journal. Why? Because the paper published an article about some of the negative effects Wal-Mart-ization has had on small communities.Bob Hart, one of the upper managers for the Wal-Marts in the area, called me and said he didn’t like Mark’s column, didn’t like a lot of Mark’s columns.[...]
Mr. Hart… said he and his stores couldn’t tolerate a newspaper that would print the opinions of someone who was as mean and negative as Mark O’Brien. But, you know, Mark’s not nearly as ornery as that left-wing rabble-rouser Molly Ivins, whose column the newspaper also publishes. At any rate, Mr. Hart said he wanted the newspaper to get its racks off his lots. But he also said that if I fired Mark, we could talk about continuing to sell the newspaper at his stores.[...]
I might understand it if Wal-Mart said I ought to fire Mark because what he said wasn’t accurate. But that isn’t the case. Mark accurately reported that there are 10,000 children of Wal-Mart employees in a health-care program that is costing Georgia taxpayers nearly $10 million a year.[...]
That’s why Mark still has a job and you can’t buy a Pensacola News Journal at Wal-Mart anymore.
My views about Wal-Mart have already been expressed here and here, and there is a good post here by David Sirota.
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