Walmart

Green roof of doom

Wal-Mart is building a store inside Chicago city limits with a 67,000 square foot green roof. Unfortunately, Wal-Mart's plants do not absorb rainwater or prevent runoff. They only emit eeeevil. You've been warned.

(via TH)

An interview with Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott

Last week, Wal-Mart joined leading energy executives in their startling call for mandatory caps on greenhouse-gas emissions. The heart of this monolithic retail Grinch grew three sizes that day — or so it seemed to many environmental Who’s. Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott. For many enviros, the name “Wal-Mart” has always triggered a shudder. The world’s […]

350 families have tended the 14-acre plot for 13 years

Several readers have independently sent in word about this: "L.A. South Central Farm Receives 3-Day Eviction Notice."

Over 13 years, 350 families have been growing organic produce in a 14-acre garden plot in South Central Los Angeles. But now:

Two days ago the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department unceremoniously posted an eviction notice on the farm's gate calling for the farm to be vacated by March 6th (next Monday). That would leave current crops in the ground to be plowed under by a developer's bulldozers. The intended replacement for the farm is a warehouse intended to serve (primarily) Wal-Mart.

The linked story has information on how you can help, if you so choose. You can also check out the South Central Farmers website. I believe protests are ongoing -- if anybody in the area has an update, let me know.

Always low toxics? Well, sometimes, at least

A while back I wrote about all the "fake news" -- really, just corporate P.R. -- that comes into my email inbox as a result of our work on flame retardants in people's bodies. Most of the news stories are really just press releases from companies touting the fact that they'd removed PBDEs and other hazardous substances from their products. Any single press release, by itself, is hardly worthy of notice. But viewed as a whole, the steady drumbeat of companies announcing that they'd managed to make their products less toxic seemed like an important, if unheralded, good news story.

Wal-Mart boss gets some tips from the Prince of Wales

Here is a story about Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott seeking greenie advice from the Prince of Wales. Any attempt on my part to summarize the tale wouldn't be nearly as good as the article itself, so I offer you the best tidbits of blunt British reporting. I love me some British.

The Times on Wal-Mart:

Mr Scott is desperate to transform the image of the monolithic retail organisation, which has a history of building huge superstores on the edge of towns on greenfield sites and squashing competition with an aggressive pricing policy.

The Times on the Prince of Wales:

[A] champion of green causes whose own lavish lifestyle often comes in for criticism.

The Times on Charles' twitterpation with Scott:

The Prince, who is acutely aware of the bad public relations profile of Wal-Mart, decided to go ahead with the meeting because it was a rare chance to meet the head of such a large company.

The Times on why the Prince shouldn't have been so twitterpated:

When Wal-Mart took over Asda [the second-biggest retailer in Britain] in 1999 it withdrew from Business in the Community, which is headed by the Prince and which seeks to introduce good corporate practice in all sizes of companies.

Apparently Scott and the Prince just talked and made out and stuff. No word on what tidbits of wisdom the Prince actually provided -- if you know what I mean. Incidentally, Wal-Mart, while making steps in the environment department, still sucks at taking care of its workers.

Why the global food system isn’t kind to local farmers

Recently, I've come across two articles that pungently demonstrate the place of small-scale farmers in a global economy geared toward long-distance trade.

The first, a Salon-published excerpt from Charles Fishman's recent book The Wal-Mart Effect, explores what the U.S. love affair with $5/pound salmon means for Chile. (Prepare to click through a few ads to get to the story.) The other, a NY Times piece, depicts high-level hand-wringing in China over rural "land grabs by officials eager to cash in on China's booming economy."

(Thanks to Tyler Bell for alerting me to the Salon piece.)

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of … KA-DUUUM!

So Friday night, I finally got around to seeing Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices, with a group of folks at my wife's church.

Perhaps I went in with distorted expectations. The movie's been showered with hype, promotion, and gushing reviews since before it came out, so I anticipated something a little more ... polished.

But it struck me as rather amateurish. I mean, if you want to make a point, is throwing spinning text at the screen with a big loud KA-DUUUM! really the way to do it?

I could forgive the scrappy, seat-of-the-pants technical quality. What I couldn't get past is the constant sense that I was being manipulated -- pretty crassly. I mean, I'm on the film's side. I hate Wal-Mart's labor and environmental practices as much as the next guy. But still I felt like I was being played for a dupe, that my intelligence was being underestimated. What few actual facts and statistics showed up in the film (there was way, way too much "chatting with average red-state folks" for me, but maybe I'm not the target audience) seemed, with a few exceptions, vague and cherry-picked.

In the end, the documentary is designed purely for rabble-rousing. It's openly partisan -- a big haymaker rather than some kind of nuanced look at a company, its effects, and the economic system that produced it. A wonk like me would have preferred the latter.

(I should also say that the activist campaign built up around the film is more admirable in many ways than the film itself.)

Update [2005-12-13 11:59:37 by David Roberts]: Julian Sanchez's review of the film in Reason is quite astute.

New Wal-Mart documentary may be a sign of upheavals to come

Last week’s release of Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price — not, for the most part, in movie theaters, but rather in “churches, family businesses, schools, living rooms, community centers, and parking lots,” as the film’s website puts it — marks a high-water moment in leftist media-based organizing. Image: walmartmovie.com. Director/producer Robert Greenwald adopted […]

Wal-Mart’s eco-announcements generate a clash among activists

The mother ship. Photo: Wal-Mart. It was easy for Wal-Mart’s critics to laugh this past spring when CEO Lee Scott proudly announced that he drove a Lexus hybrid. For Scott to expect praise for his consumer choices given the abysmal record of his massive company — which has repeatedly violated the Clean Water Act while […]