I was once a Wal-Mart basher. Under the original CEO and Founder Sam Wall, all sorts of injustices were propagated ranging from outright racism, discrimination, unfair treatment of employees, and of course bullying. Simply by locating a Wal-Mart in a neighborhood supposedly destroys countless mom & pop stores by providing extremely low price wares. Wal-Mart’s buying power, due to it’s immense size, is equally immense. There’s just no way a mom & pop store can compete with such power.
Lately though, now that the employee & discrimination lawsuits have been settled, and the ultra-religious-yet-inexplicaby-tyrannical-Sam Wall has passed, the lumbering giant has begun to soften and become a bit more responsible to the world it resides in.
First, there’s the energy saving. Wal-Marts across the world are being celebrated because they have become very green when it comes to cutting down on their energy use. Detractors point to the huge dollar savings this behemoth gains when it lowers its energy cost, but I’ll give Wal-Mart the benefit of the doubt here. Sure they are saving money, huge, huge amounts of money, but the new regime is doing other things that aren’t such money-saving-ideas. And, we must remember, Sam Wall never implemented any of these energy saving concepts.
You may have seen in the local news that Wal-Mart has now decided, all of its private label eggs will from now on be cage-free. Why is this a big deal? Wal-Mart sells 30% of all the retail food in the United States. Let that number sink in. One third of all the food sold in the U.S. at retail is from a Wal-Mart. The farms who supply the private label eggs have to completely revamp their systems or risk losing the business. If the farms also supply eggs to other stores, then suddenly we’re going to be seeing more and more cage-free eggs on other store shelves. Last November the Humane Society of the United States filed a shareholder resolution to Wal-Mart, demanding to know what steps the retailer was taking to move toward cage-free eggs. The HSUS has now removed that resolution in light of the news.
The March issue of The Atlantic claims that a comparison of the basic offerings at Whole Foods Markets are virtually the same as Wal-Mart’s produce department. Wal-Mart has also implemented a chain-wide mandate called “heritage agriculture” to buy more and more produce from local sources as part of its overall plan for sustainability and social consciousness.
Now consider this phenomenon: according to Bob Vosburgh of Supermarket News, a recent study by two independent professors found that:
“the arrival of a Wal-Mart Supercenter into a low-income area has a beneficial impact on eating habits, because fresh produce becomes less expensive. The authors cite data from studies showing that, even after accounting for discount cards and sales, Wal-Mart maintains a price advantage of 8%-27% on various food items. [They] estimate that competing supermarkets reduce their prices by 1% – 1.2% after the entry of a Wal-Mart Supercenter into the area.”
Now surely these lower prices may have a negative impact on the margins of a mom & pop store, but in food deserts where low-income families have been forced to get their daily groceries from outrageously high priced (and low health) convenience stores, this should be good news.
So maybe, just maybe, with the dictator gone, this evil giant is softening and becoming a kinder, gentler giant.
