Sept 29, 2004

by Associated Press

Bloomberg News

Reuters

Wal-Mart Denied Location

By First Coast News Staff

Crowd forces delay of Wal-Mart review

Wal-Mart drops plans for S. Side store

Wal-Mart design up for review

Wal-Mart Rejects Proposed Location In Northeast D.C.

Wal-Mart set on Supercenter project

Wal-Mart Hiring Pros And Ex-Cons

Wal-Mart of the Gods

By Seth Jayson (TMFBent)               [back to top]
September 30, 2004

For the past month or so, the news headlines have been decrying what my waggish friend Ian might call "El Wal-Mart del Sol." Been asleep? Here's the quick version. Wal-Mart's (NYSE: WMT) Mexican subsidiary, Bodega Aurrera is building a big-box store near the famous archeological site containing the Temple of the Sun.

How near, how big, and what exactly the impact will be is the subject of some furious controversy, including protests, a big P.R. campaign, and even machete-wielding mobs. Opponents (and The New York Times reporters) call the store ugly, claim it harms important archeological remains, and contend that it will put a local market out of business. Company officials say the facility is being made smaller to fit into the environment, and that archeologists have given the project the all clear.

There appears to be only one point of agreement: that a majority of locals want to see the store because they are convinced it will get them lower prices.

I've questioned Wal-Mart's bogus lip service in the past. The typical line is something like, "We only want to save money for the masses." Please spare me, Comrade Walton. You want to make money. Too often, you've done it at the expense of small-town businesses and local wishes. That's not good.

Issues like local control and fair labor practices are the reason that sometimes I'm down with the PC thing. Heck, I haven't eaten at Yum! Brand's (NYSE: YUM) Taco Bell since I learned what goes on with the folks who pick their tomatoes.

At the same time, I'm a capitalist at heart, and I think it's awfully easy to take swings at the big kid, even when he's not bullying. Do Target (NYSE: TGT), Costco (Nasdaq: COST), or Dollar General (NYSE: DG) get the same kind of flack? Well, OK, Costco did get into a fight in the same Mexican turf, but the point remains, it's easy to be angry at Wal-Mart without looking at all the facts. If everyone wants it and the local market trades in cheap plastic goods -- according to a chief opponent of the project -- what's the harm? Who's protecting whom, and from what?

Unfortunately, the point-counterpoint habits of media reporting tend to emphasize the expanse of the ideological gulf at the expense of true objectivity or truth, if there is such a thing. The middle ground is lost completely.

Whatever the circumstances of this particular dustup, Wal-Mart investors need to keep an eye on public perceptions as the chain becomes ever more prominent around the globe. The example of world whipping boy Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is enough to show that playing the heavy can be unexpectedly expensive.

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Lawsuit alleges Wal-Mart biased against black truckers

by Associated Press                                [back to top]
Wednesday, September 29, 2004

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) _ Wal-Mart has been sued in federal court by a man who claims the world's largest retailer discriminates against blacks in 12 Southern states from seeking truck-driving jobs.

The plaintiff, Daryal T. Nelson, of Coldwater, Miss., alleges that Wal-Mart rejects and discourages black applicants for truck-driving jobs at the chain's distribution centers in Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

An Equal Employment Opportunity Commission document attached to the complaint found ``reasonable cause'' to believe Nelson, a 22-year veteran of driving trucks, was discriminated against. The EEOC said Wal-Mart hired some white drivers with more serious driving violations and less experience than black applicants.

Gus Whitcomb, a spokesman for Wal-Mart, said Wednesday that he couldn't comment on the lawsuit because he hadn't seen it. However, he said, ``We do not discriminate in our hiring practices.''

The suit, filed Wednesday, seeks class-action status.

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Developers of Chatham mall rule out Wal-Mart

September 28, 2004                                      [back to top]
BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter 
From Chicago Sun-Times

Developers of a proposed, 500,000-square-foot shopping mall in the South  Side's Chatham neighborhood have sent a letter to Chicago aldermen assuring them that Wal-Mart "is not now and will not be" part of the development. 

Developer Tom Brashler sent copies of the letter to all 50 aldermen in an  effort to secure their support at Wednesday's City Council meeting for a  zoning change needed to get the project moving on the site of the old  Ryerson Steel plant at 83rd and Stewart.

"We are writing to confirm that our contract with Wal-Mart terminated in mid-August. Wal-Mart is not now and will not be a part of our development of  the Ryerson site," Brashler wrote.

"Based on this commitment, we are hopeful that you and your colleagues will be able to support the requested retail zoning of the property . . . and  allow the project to go forward. We believe that Chatham Market is a wonderful project that will provide vitally needed economic development to  the community and to the city."

The Chicago Sun-Times reported earlier this month that Wal-Mart's contract  to build a second Chicago store on the South Side had expired and was not  renewed amid concern about minimum wage and benefit standards that may be imposed on "big-box" stores. A West Side Wal-Mart that aldermen have already approved is also in jeopardy, the company said.

Planning and Development Commissioner Denise Casalino responded by saying that the zoning change could go ahead. But the $33 million subsidy for environmental clean-up and infrastructure costs would have to wait. 

"The project isn't a go if the developer can't make it a go. We're not  committing to nothing. . . . He doesn't have a project unless he has two  anchor tenants," Casalino said.

Wal-Mart's entry into the Chicago market has been mired in controversy in a  battle royal with organized labor.

Earlier this year, a bitterly divided City Council handed Wal-Mart a split  decision: zoning approval to build its first Chicago store in the West  Side's Austin community and a one-vote defeat in Chatham.

The vote followed an acrimonious debate that saw organized labor's City  Council allies throw the kitchen sink at Wal-Mart. They talked about a  "predatory pricing" scheme that drives smaller competitors out of business  and about a retailing behemoth that provides low-paying jobs with meager  benefits and faces lawsuits in 30 different states for allegedly forcing  hourly workers to work overtime without pay.

Since then, a pair of ordinances have been introduced aimed at establishing a minimum wage and benefit standard for Wal-Mart and other "big box"  retailers.

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Bias Suit Delayed Against Wal-Mart

Bloomberg News                [back to top]
September 28, 2004

A federal district judge in San Francisco halted a discrimination lawsuit yesterday against Wal-Mart Stores until an appeals court reviews a ruling that allows 1.6 million female workers to sue as a group.

Wal-Mart had asked Judge Martin Jenkins to temporarily halt the suit, which contends that women who worked for Wal-Mart were paid less than men and offered fewer promotions.

The company is appealing a ruling by Judge Jenkins that allows the suit to be declared a class action, which is more efficient for the plaintiffs and provides leverage for a settlement.

Wal-Mart denies that it discriminated against female employees and has argued in court papers that the class size is "unprecedented, unmanageable and unconstitutional."

The ruling will delay the case for six to nine months, lawyers for the workers said.

"The judge felt that having the case going on in two different forums wasn't appropriate," said Brad Seligman, the plaintiffs' lead lawyer. "There will be a delay, but in the end Wal-Mart will have to face the music."

Mona Williams, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart of Bentonville, Ark., said Judge Jenkins's ruling "stands on its own," and she declined further comment.

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Wal-Mart appeals to Californians in open letter

2004-09-25 / Reuters         [back to top]

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. sent an open letter to California residents on Thursday as part of a new campaign by the world's biggest retailer to overcome resistance to its plans for expansion in that state.

Wal-Mart published the letter in 15 newspapers two weeks after Chief Executive Lee Scott told Wall Street analysts the company had failed to repair its reputation and had begun a "culture change."

The retailer has been hit by dozens of discrimination cases, organized labor has charged it with anti-union practices, and opponents in California have complained that the Bentonville, Arkansas-based chain unfairly squeezes out smaller, locally owned businesses.

The letter begins a statewide effort to "set the record straight," said a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, which plans to open up to 40 supercenters in California in the next few years.

"While we are always willing to consider constructive criticism, much of what has been said publicly about Wal-Mart is simply not true," the letter said.

The retailer, whose workers are not represented by a union, said it pays competitive wages and provides employee health benefits, contributes to the California economy by buying the state's goods and services, and supports local organizations.

It said Southern California households can save at least US$589 per year by shopping at the chain once Wal-Mart reaches 20 percent market share. The company did not give its current market share.

Experts said the direct appeal to consumers should help Wal-Mart improve its image.

"The directness of the approach is a good thing," said Wendy Liebmann, president of New York-based retail marketing and consulting firm WSL Strategic Retail.

"They recognize they have to be more proactive in building some kind of consensus in the places where they want to do business."

Tough opposition

But one opponent said she won't be swayed by Wal-Mart's campaign.

Oakland City Councilwoman Jane Brunner, who dismissed the letter as "propaganda," said a Wal-Mart supercenter would force rival grocery stores to close and limit the number of places poor consumers can walk to to buy food and other staples.

The Northern California city recently passed an ordinance that would restrict Wal-Mart from opening a supercenter, though the company is already in the process of building one of its traditional stores in Oakland, Brunner said.

In Southern California, voters in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood attracted national attention in March when they rejected a proposed supercenter, which unlike traditional Wal-Mart stores, include full-line grocery departments.

This month, opponents of a plan to build a Wal-Mart in Rosemead, another Los Angeles suburb, said they would lead a campaign to recall the entire city council because it had approved construction of the store. A spokeswoman said Wal-Mart plans to build a traditional store in Rosemead, though the store could be converted to a supercenter down the road.

The Los Angeles City Council last month approved a measure requiring Wal-Mart to pay for an economic impact study to show whether the huge stores would hurt existing businesses.

In last year's 20-week Southern California grocery strike, chains like Albertsons Inc. and Kroger Co. said they needed to cut health benefits to compete with Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart's first California supercenter opened this spring in the desert town of La Quinta, and others are expected to open in Hemet and Stockton next month. The number of traditional Wal-Mart stores in California has grown to 148 since the first one opened in 1990, a spokeswoman said.

Other so-called big box retailers like Home Depot Inc. and Lowe's Cos Inc. have also faced opposition in some California communities where residents feared the impact such stores would have on local businesses.

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Residents fight to keep three Wal-Marts out of town

September 25, 2004, 3:45 PM EDT             [back to top]

DEPTFORD, N.J.(AP) _ Residents trying to keep three planned Wal-Marts out of their town have taken the fight to court.

The Concerned Citizens of Deptford has already mounted a protest outside the town hall and mailed flyers to other residents. On Monday, the group filed a lawsuit in state Superior Court hoping to keep the first store from being built.

"We're not looking for anything financial. We're looking to stop these Wal-Marts," Mike Campbell told the Philadelphia Inquirer for its Saturday editions.

Campbell and his fellow protesters contend that the three stores would increase traffic, lower property values and hurt small businesses in the suburb, which is already home to several large shopping centers.

In the lawsuit, the group alleges that the township planning board improperly approved an application for the Wal-Mart during a July vote. The complaint contends officials violated the state Open Public Meetings Act.

Township Manager Joseph Picardi denied the allegations and told the newspaper that the planning board attorney "goes through hoops to make sure we follow the proper procedures."

The store in question is planned for Delsea Drive near Cooper Street. A spot near the Deptford Mall on Clements Bridge Road is under consideration for the second store, while the third location has not been identified.

"We think the market will bear three stores in Deptford," Wal-Mart senior manager Mia Masten told the newspaper. The stores will eventually generate about $1 million in tax revenues for the town as well as 600 new jobs, Masten said.

Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press

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Wal-Mart fires back

Store rebuts critics who say it drives rivals out, drives pay down  [back to top]   

Jenny Strasburg, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, September 24, 2004

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. began a statewide offensive Thursday to counter widespread criticism of the company's wages and benefits, expansion plans and effects on communities.

The world's largest company ran advertisements in 15 California newspapers, including The Chronicle, in the form of an open letter to the state's residents, referring to criticism as "half-truths and misinformation" from "certain elected officials, competitors and powerful special interest groups."

The letter describes Wal-Mart as a dynamic force that generates $650 million in sales tax in California and supports 4,600 suppliers in the state, such as farmers and technology companies. The ads portray Wal-Mart as a company whose size has made it the victim of unfair attacks.

The dramatic public relations push came two weeks after Wal-Mart Chief Executive Officer Lee Scott told Wall Street analysts in New York that the company had failed to polish its reputation amid a barrage of high-profile lawsuits alleging discrimination against women and minorities and abusive wage- and-hour policies. The company denies any wrongdoing.

In California, Wal-Mart has faced intense opposition in communities where it has sought to build Supercenters -- a format that combines a discount store and supermarket. The most vocal detractors have included unionized grocery giant Safeway Inc. of Pleasanton and United Food and Commercial Workers leaders who represent tens of thousands of the state's supermarket workers.

During the bitter four-and-a-half-month Southern California grocery strike and lockout that ended in February, Safeway and its rivals Kroger Co. and Albertson's Inc. said that increasing competition from Wal-Mart had left them no choice but to slice wages and benefits. The union and supermarkets are negotiating contracts in Northern California affecting 30,000 workers, and competition from Wal-Mart remains a focus.

"While we are always willing to consider constructive criticism, much of what has been said publicly about Wal-Mart in California is simply not true," Wal-Mart said in Thursday's open letter.

Wal-Mart said it offers health care benefits to both full- and part-time workers. More than 40 percent of Wal-Mart workers didn't have medical insurance before joining the company, the ad says.

It also says that Wal-Mart wages, which average $10.37 an hour in California, are competitive with wages paid by comparable retailers. More than 80 percent of workers are full time, the letter added in response to allegations that the discounter purposely maintains a large part-time workforce to keep benefit costs low.

"Wal-Mart as a company has been relatively quiet in how it has responded to some of the criticism out there," Bob McAdam, vice president of corporate communications, said in an interview. "We've certainly responded to news media inquiries, but we haven't been out there telling our story very well."

It's unclear how the message will come across in a diverse state that offers both huge business opportunities as well as challenges to the Bentonville, Ark., discount giant.

"They're putting themselves on the defensive (and) giving fodder to their opponents," said brand-image expert Steven Addis, chief executive of the Addis Group in Berkeley.

Critics said they are not impressed with Wal-Mart's arguments.

"The problem with Wal-Mart is its business practices, not its image," said Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, a frequent critic of the retailer, through a spokesman. "Wal-Mart is putting on a full-court public relations campaign with the hope that the public will ignore its objectionable low-wage and benefit policies."

Ron Lind, a spokesman for eight Northern California grocery workers union locals, strongly disputed Wal-Mart's description of the average $11.08 hourly wage it says it pays Bay Area employees as "very close" to wages earned by unionized grocery workers. Unionized grocery-store cashiers make about $19 an hour, he said.

Safeway spokesman Brian Dowling separately provided the same figure for its Northern California cashiers. Entry-level Safeway workers in the lowest- paid position, grocery baggers, make $8.40 an hour in Northern California, Dowling said. Meat-department employees make an average of $21.95 an hour, he said.

McAdam said that because Wal-Mart doesn't have Supercenters in Northern California, supermarket wages aren't directly comparable. "We believe we're competitive with the marketplace," he said.

The company's ad also notes that California Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores, its membership warehouses, gave more than $11 million to local causes last year. It also repeated that it plans to build 40 Supercenters over the next few years.

Safeway CEO Steve Burd, in a recent interview with The Chronicle, said Wal-Mart is playing down its plans. He said a new, 1.3-million-square-foot distribution center in Southern California is big enough to serve more than 100 Supercenters, and Wal-Mart wouldn't have built such a large facility for only 40 Supercenters.

"I get a little concerned when our competitors are trying to describe our business, and they don't know what they're talking about," McAdam said. "We are not planning to open any more than 40 (Supercenters) at this point in time" in California.

In California, the company has 148 Wal-Mart discount stores, one Supercenter in Southern California and 32 Sam's Clubs. Two Supercenters are scheduled to open next month, in Stockton and Hemet (Riverside County).

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Edited by  Kevin Ronningen, Producer
© 2004 First Coast News Staff. All rights reserved.

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Elliot Zwiebach                          [back to top]
September 21, 2004

COLUMBUS, Ohio (September 21, 2004) - Wal-Mart Stores, Bentonville, Ark., is "well on its way" to achieving its goal of controlling a 30% market share in every category in which it competes, according to  a newly released study by Retail Forward, a management consulting and market research firm based here. A survey of Wal-Mart shoppers indicated Wal-Mart is attracting 30% or more of consumer dollars in several core categories, Retail Forward said, including small personal appliances, skin and hair care products, housewares, small kitchen appliances and toys. Several other categories are "inching their way toward the 30% mark." The study also said 50% of all U.S. primary household shoppers visit a Wal-Mart store monthly and 25% shop at a Wal-Mart supercenter weekly, compared with only 20% of shoppers who visited a SuperTarget store in the past six months who indicated they are weekly SuperTarget shoppers. The study also said two-thirds of Wal-Mart supercenter shoppers shop both sides of the store.

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Sam Whiting (SF Chronicle)              [back to top]
Sunday, September 19, 2004

Litigator Jocelyn Larkin has one advantage in taking on the army of men who serve as Wal-Mart lawyers in Bentonville, Ark. She's taller than they are. At 5 feet, 10 inches, Larkin, 45, is nearly as tall as the stack of
binders marked "Wal-Mart" in her office at the Impact Fund in the Berkeley\Marina.

What is the nut of the Wal-Mart case?
In every store in every job in the country, women are being paid less than men for doing the same exact job.

How much less?
On average, the disparity in pay between men and women doing the same work is 5 [to] 15 percent.

How did the case walk through the door?
Everyone wants an Erin Brockovich story. The true story is that there were two lawyers in New Mexico who had been doing sexual harassment cases against Wal-Mart. They called us, and we spent a year and a half
investigating.

What did you find out?
What we saw was that two-thirds of the hourly workers were female, and by the time you got to store manager, it was fewer than 10 percent. They promoted the men.

How big is the suit?
We estimate it [the class] is 1.6 million women. It will be the largest civil rights case ever.

What is the name attached to the suit?
Betty Dukes is from the Pittsburg store. She's the lead plaintiff in Dukes vs. Wal-Mart stores.

Does Betty Dukes still work at Wal-Mart?
She's a greeter, the person at the door. She's been there 10 years, and until we filed the case, she was making $8.30 an hour. Since we filed the case, they have raised her to about $12 an hour.

What should she be making?
She should be in management making between $40,000 and $60,000 a year.

If you win, what will Betty Dukes be entitled to?
She will be made whole, meaning she will get the pay she should have had, had she not been the victim of discrimination.

What do the Wal-Mart lawyers make of you?
Their entire existence is focused on making money. The fact that the Impact Fund is a nonprofit with nothing monetary to gain is baffling to them.

Have you shopped at Wal-Mart?
Yes. I've had to spend an enormous amount of time in Bentonville, Ark., where Wal-Mart is headquartered.

Do they know you in Bentonville?
I do sort of stand out. I get to the hotel, and the front-desk clerks know me as the woman who brings her own coffee. I pack Peet's. It's a very small town.

A one-hotel town?
Even "hotel" is very generous. Parked right outside my window will be rows of 18-wheelers. You ask people for a good place to eat, and they always say Applebee's.

How long will it take?
My guess is three to five more years. It's like a really long book that doesn't end.

Where do you live?
North Berkeley, about six blocks from where I grew up.

Did that give you a feminist bent?
I'm one of four girls raised by a divorced mother. There was a lot of girl power in the house.

What does your husband do?
He's a lawyer for the University of California. His name is Christopher Patti. His main case is fighting Enron. Neither of us will get any money if we win.

How about your two boys?
They are 10 and 11. Apart from their passion for cars, video games and anything that will explode, they're budding feminists.

How do you know that?
One of them brought an assignment home that said, "Write a sentence about a promotion at Wal-Mart or Kmart." Something like, "Lettuce is 25 cents off." He wrote "Women get fewer promotions at Wal-Mart than do men."

E-mail Sam Whiting at swhiting@sfchronicle.com.
Copyright 2004 SF Chronicle

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Wal-Mart out to change image - Retailer turns to supporting public broadcasting

By Constance L. Hays, New York Times           [back to top]
Sunday, September 12, 2004

Wal-Mart, stung by criticism of its labor practices, expansion plans and other business tactics, is turning to public radio, public television and even journalists in training to try to improve its image.

So far this year, the company has become a sponsor on National Public Radio, where recorded messages promote its stores. It has underwritten a popular talk show, "Tavis Smiley," accompanied by similar promotional messages, on a public television station in California.

Wal-Mart announced plans to award $500,000 in scholarships to minority students at journalism programs around the country, including Howard University, University of Southern California and Columbia University.

Wal-Mart has not supported any of those organizations in the past. But as the company outgrows its rural roots and moves into suburbs and cities, it is encountering more resistance from people whose traditions and values may be different from those of Wal-Mart's historic customers.

The company has been faulted for its selective approach toward the publications that it sells, which has included banning three men's magazines and ordering plastic covers to conceal what it considered "uncomfortable" headlines on several women's titles, including Glamour and Redbook.

It has refused to sell music albums with what it deems offensive lyrics, and manufacturers acknowledge producing sanitized versions of popular CDs to maintain a presence in the giant retailer's stores.

Mona Williams, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said the journalism scholarships were "a first of their kind" for the retailer, and came about because of the recent publicity around its business practices.

"We've really been in the spotlight and I think that's made us especially sensitive to the need for balanced coverage," Williams said. "It doesn't matter if the subject is Wal-Mart or something else. You just aren't going to have that unless different perspectives are represented." Without diversity, she added, "the result can be narrower thinking as news events are presented to the public."

Influencing that presentation may be at the heart of the effort, although Williams said there was "no hidden agenda here" and added that it probably would have been done even if Wal-Mart had not come under scrutiny.

John Siegenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, said, "Wal-Mart is doing what most corporations do: when they feel pain, they try to salve the wound." He predicted that "they may get less out of it than they expect to," but he added that "if it helps minority journalism, I hope they salve it with more than half a million dollars."

As for public radio, Williams said the company sought the demographic that National Public Radio listeners represent. The goal is to "reach community leaders and help them understand the value that we bring to their areas."

A spokeswoman for NPR, Jenny Lawhorn, said its audience consisted of "intelligent and well-educated people" who "tend to be business leaders and tend to be engaged in the civic process." According to a recent survey, about 56 percent of them are Wal-Mart shoppers, she said, compared with 66 percent of the general population.

Wooing community leaders fits well into Wal-Mart's plans. The company has stumbled in recent months against opposition to its stores. In April, its effort to win voter support for a store in the Inglewood was defeated after the company took the unusual step of putting the issue on the ballot. An attempt to build a store in Chicago was rejected, although a second store was approved, while plans to open a store in downtown New Orleans have been slowed by opposition as well.

The company has also been criticized by labor unions, which say Wal-Mart fights their organizing efforts. In California, unionized supermarket workers staged a lengthy strike earlier this year seeking benefits that stores said they could not afford because they needed to compete with Wal-Mart.

Neither Wal-Mart nor NPR would reveal what it pays as an NPR sponsor. The contract began Feb. 16 and extends until January. Total corporate financing is expected to reach $30 million this year, Lawhorn said. As part of its NPR arrangement, Wal-Mart is described several ways when it is mentioned as an underwriter on the air.

The descriptions include the following: "Wal-Mart. Providing jobs and opportunities for millions of Americans of all ages and all walks of life." Another says the company is "bringing communities job opportunities, goods and services and support for neighborhood programs."

NPR has received letters and e-mail messages from listeners since the Wal-Mart underwriting information began to be broadcast. One listener wrote: "What a disappointment! Maybe next it will be Halliburton." The role of Wal-Mart was taken up by NPR's ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, who wrote in his NPR.org online column, "Wal-Mart symbolizes values that some listeners believe to be antithetical to the values of public radio" and suggested that "one way that NPR could prove that underwriting has no effect on its integrity is for NPR to produce more hard-hitting interviews, more investigative reporting and yes, even more scandalizing satires."

Wal-Mart also underwrites "Tavis Smiley," a talk show on KCET, the public television station in Los Angeles.

The program began in January and Wal-Mart was on board immediately, a spokesman for the show, Joel Brokaw, said.

In late March, Smiley interviewed Wal-Mart's chief executive, H. Lee Scott Jr., who is seldom made available to reporters. After disclosing twice that Wal-Mart sponsored the show, Smiley went on to ask his guest about Wal-Mart's image problems. Brokaw said he did not know how much Wal-Mart paid to be a sponsor.

The journalism plan evolved separately, Williams said. Ten journalism schools will receive $50,000 each, which will be distributed as $2,500 scholarships to four students at each school. The scholarships will be awarded in each student's junior year and can be renewed for the senior year as well.

The recipients chosen include Arizona State University and Syracuse University. Administrators at the universities said the selections came as a complete surprise. In most cases, corporate donations for scholarships are unheard of, the administrators said, unless the corporation is involved in the news business or another communications medium like advertising.

"It's kind of a reach to expect companies that don't see themselves as part of the media world to support journalism education," said Steve Doig, the interim director of the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State, where some scholarships have been provided by newspaper companies like Gannett.

Doig, a former reporter for the Miami Herald, said that he was aware of Wal-Mart's practices with magazines but that did not prevent him from accepting the scholarship money.

"It's not the American Nazi Party," he said. "I don't see Wal-Mart as problematic enough to miss the opportunity they are offering to several of our students."

He added: "Both the banning of certain magazines and the decision to give money to journalism schools are calculated behaviors and not necessarily contrary. I don't support banning newspapers or any particular publication, but a company has the right to decide what it wants to sell."

Wal-Mart also plans to include the scholarship students at next year's annual shareholder meeting, Williams said.

"They will be guests in the audience, and we think that would be a great educational experience for them," she said. They may also have tours of the company's offices in Bentonville, Ark., as well as a warehouse nearby.

Tom Bowers, dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said the move was "saying to the public, look at the good thing we're doing." North Carolina was not one of the journalism schools designated by Wal-Mart for scholarships, but the university awards about $100,000, some from media companies, to students every year, Bowers said.

"The people who win our scholarships typically don't go to any national meetings and aren't put on display by these corporate donors," he said. "We certainly make sure there is no quid pro quo on these. The only obligation is to write them a letter and thank them for the scholarship. The student isn't expected to do anything for the company."

Of the programs chosen, only the University of Southern California's Annenberg School has received corporate funding from nonmedia companies in the past. A spokesman, Geoffrey Baum, said the school had gotten money from Nissan and General Motors, as well as from Raytheon and Home Depot for public-relations programs. Some journalism programs are in states where Wal-Mart has opened a large number of stores. The University of Florida and the University of Texas made the list; those states have nearly 600 of Wal-Mart's 3,596 stores, according to Wal-Mart.

Jannette L. Dates, dean of Howard University's John H. Johnson School of Communications, hopes that Wal-Mart's scholarship will encourage other nonmedia companies to contribute.

"I'm going to go after some of those others and say 'See, Wal-Mart did this, why don't you?'" she said.

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AMERICAN CANYON/Ruling favors Wal-Mart -- both sides to appeal

Demian Bulwa, SF Chronicle Staff Writer                        [back to top]
Saturday, September 11, 2004

Opponents of a proposed Wal-Mart supercenter that has divided residents of the small Napa County city of American Canyon said Friday they would appeal the city planning commission's approval of the store's design after an emotional six-hour hearing.

In a twist, Wal-Mart said it would appeal the commission's 3-2 approval - - at 1 a.m. Friday -- because it limited the store's hours to 6 a.m. to midnight. Wal-Mart supercenters -- more than 1,600 in all -- are open 24 hours.

The appeals must be filed within 10 days, and the City Council could rule on them next month. Wal-Mart could open the supercenter as soon as late next year.

More than 450 people packed a school gymnasium Thursday for the first public meeting since Wal-Mart signed on to build a 176,000-square-foot supercenter to anchor the Napa Junction development on Highway 29, which will include apartments, a park, a hotel and retail stores. The proposal is the talk of a fast-growing city of about 14,000 people, at times pitting longtime residents eager to finally shop close to home against newcomers who believe Wal-Mart -- and its customers -- will tarnish a relatively affluent city with the slogan "Gateway to the Napa Valley. "

Commissioner Charlie Johnson spoke favorably of Wal-Mart, saying after the hearing, "I've lived here since 1981, and I'm tired of going out of town to shop."

Anthony Quicho, who voted yes along with Michele Castagnola, said American Canyon would be a bad fit for a supercenter "targeted for low-income people." However, he said, the issue before the commission was the store's design, not whether it could come to town.

Neither of the two dissenters, Donald Callison and Pamela Quiroz, spoke of halting Wal-Mart's plans. Rather, Callison said he wanted to give the city more time to work out conditions for Wal-Mart to follow. "There are a lot of things I'd rather see there," he said. "But truth be told, nobody else wanted to play."

The planning commission's approval came with several conditions: Wal-Mart must prohibit overnight RV camping in its parking lot, remove graffiti within 24 hours and keep its vending machines and carts out of sight. City officials said the project's master plan had been approved in December and included having an unnamed big-box retailer anchor it. Wal-Mart was the only one interested, said City Manager Mark Joseph. But opponents said the master plan set aside a 165,000-square-foot retail space that could have been divided into several smaller businesses. The newly formed American Canyon Residents United for Responsible Growth plans to appeal the planning commission approval, said Brett Jolley, a Stockton attorney representing the group.

He said Wal-Mart should be required to apply for a conditional use permit under city law because it offers retail food sales and because of the size of its sign. The impact of the project could then be subject to further environmental review, Jolley said. City officials and developers say no special permit is required.

"The city is not cutting square corners and taking a hard look at this as they are required to do by law," Jolley said.

Wal-Mart's attorney, Judy Davidoff, said the company would appeal the ruling, but she declined further comment.

Opponents say Wal-Mart engages in ruthless cost-cutting that undercuts local businesses, and they criticize the company for its low wages and anti- union stance. They hope to stall the project, and they are following a state Senate bill that would force cities or counties to complete an economic impact report before allowing Wal-Mart-style superstores. The bill is now on the governor's desk.

Supporters in American Canyon say a supercenter would bring needed sales tax revenue -- more than $600,000 a year, according to the city -- to American Canyon. Many say they enjoy shopping at Wal-Mart and are excited by the supercenter's size.

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AMERICAN CANYON Proposed Wal-Mart divides growing city

Many wary of store that others view as progress

Demian Bulwa - SF Chronicle Staff Writer    [back to top]
Thursday, September 9, 2004

Fast-growing American Canyon has long been defined by its proximity to other places.

The Napa County city was founded a half-century ago by military families from nearby Mare Island. Many of its newest homeowners discovered it while cruising Highway 29 on their way to view open houses in Vallejo or Napa. And the city's slogan is "Gateway to the Napa Valley," which hints at its dream of luring wine-tasters to the town center.

But the identity of a city that incorporated 12 years ago is at the center of its biggest political fight, which comes to a head tonight when the planning commission is expected to make American Canyon the second Bay Area city, after Gilroy, to welcome a Wal-Mart supercenter.It has been an emotional battle, at times pitting longtime residents eager for the chance to finally shop close to home against newcomers worried Wal-Mart will tarnish the character of what is becoming an upscale community where the median home price recently hit $481,000.

"It's really a defining moment," said Mike Stanfield, 47, a history professor at the University of San Francisco who two years ago moved with his wife and three kids to American Canyon. "To have Wal-Mart defining my community is something I'd be against."

Wal-Mart's proposed 176,000-square-foot supercenter would anchor the downtown "Napa Junction" project along Highway 29 that includes apartments, a park, a hotel and other stores.

Residents announce their stances on signs in their yards. City Council members are peppered with questions while running errands. And accusations of back-room deals and political opportunism are flying.

Underscoring the contentious debate, tonight's meeting was rescheduled and moved to a gymnasium after more than 250 people packed a school cafeteria last week. Wal-Mart opponents accused the company of padding the crowd, while supporters complained too many opponents were out-of-towners. Stanfield and other opponents of the supercenter blast the retailing giant for reasons that have become rote in the anti-Wal-Mart debate -- its ruthless cost-cutting, its adverse impact on some local businesses and its low wages.

Supporters say the supercenter will bring shoppers and badly needed sales tax revenue, more than $600,000 a year according to the city, to American Canyon. They argue the city has no right to discriminate against a business. Many are simply excited about the prospect of cheap groceries and a store that sells just about everything under one roof.

"Now I can truly have a 'Wal-Mart day' -- that's what my husband calls it," said Suzette Williamson, a 48-year-old probation officer and self- described "shopaholic" who lives just outside American Canyon. "This whole area is growing, and we need more. These people are trying to keep a small- town atmosphere when they're booming."

Earlier this year, Contra Costa County voters defeated a measure to ban supercenters in unincorporated communities. And Wal-Mart could break ground on a 220,000-square-foot supercenter in Gilroy this month, although opponents have filed a lawsuit to stop the project.

Wal-Mart also hopes to open supercenters in Antioch, Tracy, Lodi, Yuba City, Redding, Chico and Red Bluff. A supercenter augments the usual Wal-Mart inventory of general merchandise with groceries. American Canyon is just 3 square miles, hemmed in by hills to the east and the Napa River to the west and bisected by Highway 29. It has filled quickly, its population jumping from roughly 6,000 to 14,000 in the past five years.

In American Canyon, as in other places, Wal-Mart has become a political rallying point. It's the leading issue in a contentious City Council race and has two of the most outspoken candidates, the mayor and the publisher of the local newspaper, trading barbs.

Mayor Lori Luporini, 54, who manages a makeup counter at Macy's, said the backlash against the supercenter was the primary reason she's running again after eight years in office.

"I think people are being misled," said Luporini, adding, "As a city, I don't believe we have a right to say who can live here and who can open a business here."

Luporini said the anger over Wal-Mart could be traced to political opportunism by Cindy Coffey, 43, the publisher and editor in chief of the Napa- Solano Post. She launched the paper two years ago after narrowly falling short in her last council bid.

Coffey called that an effort to discredit opposition to Wal-Mart. She believes city officials, developers and Wal-Mart discussed the project long before it went public, a charge that each denies. Coffey suspects the supercenter will ultimately fail and become a warehouse in the town center.

"We don't want a supercenter to anchor our downtown," Coffey said. "We're better than that."

City officials said the project's master plan had been approved last December and included an unnamed big-box retailer because none of the possible tenants, including Target, Costco and Lowe's, had agreed to sign on.

In the end, Wal-Mart was the only one interested, said city manager Mark Joseph.

"People keep asking, 'Why did we pick Wal-Mart?' " he said. "The answer is that we didn't. They picked us."

Vincent "Buzz" Butler, managing partner for the Lake Street Ventures of Napa, the developer behind the project, said national banks, chain restaurants and other businesses said they would not open in the Napa Junction Center without the supercenter as a draw.

Butler and others see the opening of a supercenter as a lucrative coup for American Canyon, but Coffey sees a different message as she simultaneously runs for office and investigates her opponents.

"If they can get into little old Napa County," she said, "who's next?" The planning commission meeting is in the gym at the American Canyon Middle School at 100 Benton Way. It starts at 6:30 p.m. For more information,

http://www.ci.american-canyon.ca.us/Departments/Planning/PC_Meeting.html.

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CEO says Wal-Mart needs to show its better side

CHICAGO (Reuters) - USA TODAY                         [back to top]
September 8, 2004

Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) can no longer remain sheltered in its Arkansas headquarters while potentially costly lawsuits pile up, Chief Executive Lee Scott said Wednesday. Scott told an analyst conference that Wal-Mart management has failed in its efforts to repair the retailer's reputation, which has been tarnished by dozens of discrimination cases and charges of worker mistreatment in recent years.

Many Wall Street analysts consider the lawsuits and bad publicity to be among the biggest obstacles to Wal-Mart's store expansion plans and profit growth.

The world's biggest retailer faces increasing opposition as it stretches beyond its rural roots and into urban areas. Voters in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood recently rejected a Wal-Mart supercenter, and other communities have passed ordinances blocking so-called big-box stores.

"We have got to eliminate this constant barrage of negatives that cause people ... to wonder if Wal-Mart will be allowed to grow," Scott said.

"Our message has not gotten out to the extent that it should. I think that's management's failure. We thought we could sit in Bentonville, take care of customers, take care of associates and the world would leave us alone," he said.

He said the company needed to be "more sophisticated" than it was in the days of charismatic founder Sam Walton, who shunned politics and public speaking. Scott and other executives have been writing editorials and speaking at conferences in hopes of improving Wal-Mart's reputation.

Scott said the retailer has begun a "little bit of a culture change" and is no longer as forgiving of employee transgressions as it was when "Mr. Sam" ran the company.

He recounted a story about an employee he had fired four times for policy breaches including rewiring a truck to make it run 90 miles per hour instead of 55. Walton kept hiring the man back because he liked him.

Today, that employee could expose Wal-Mart to a massive lawsuit if his souped-up truck were ever involved in an accident, Scott said.

"We have to hold people to a higher standard," he said.

Despite the bad news, Wal-Mart remains on track to easily exceed the $256.3 billion in sales it generated in its last fiscal year. Sales stood at $134.5 billion through the second quarter, which ended July 31, and Scott said the company remains optimistic about the holiday season.

He told analysts not to get "overly depressed" about disappointing summer sales, and joked that "Christmas will come." Scott said even after weaker-than-expected August sales, there was no reason to change the company's expectations for the vital holiday shopping season.

He acknowledged that the current economic environment was "challenging," particularly for the lower-income families that make up Wal-Mart's core customer base.

"The No. 1 issue facing the customer today is, in fact, energy prices," he said, noting that many Wal-Mart shoppers live paycheck-to-paycheck and are particularly affected by rising gasoline prices.

Other factors hitting sentiment include the "political tone," which he said remained unfairly negative despite historically low unemployment. Concerns about terrorism and ongoing violence in Iraq also weigh heavily, he said.

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Fate of Wal-Mart Supercenter Uncertain After Henry County Planning Commission Rejects Proposal

Atlanta Journal-Constitution      [back to top]              
9/2/2004
Smart Growth News
Georgia 

The first skirmish over a 24-hour Wal-Mart Supercenter proposed for 34 acres amid several quiet subdivisions in unincorporated Henry County's northwestern corner exhilarated its opponents at a Planning Commission standing-room-only hearing, with the Planning Commission unanimously turning it down.

But their campaign is not over, notes Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer Eric Stirgus, because the County Commission doesn't always follow the planners' lead and its vote, likely next month, can go either way, especially since this nation's sixth-fastest-growing county desperately needs road improvement money to ease traffic and Wal-Mart is baiting it with a promise of 480 jobs and some $1.8 million in annual sales tax revenue.

Most area residents, the writer reports, slammed the proposed Supercenter, fearing it would overwhelm a local two-lane road with traffic, bring in noise and crime, and otherwise impair their quality of life.

Wal-Mart officials tried to dispel these fears with assurances that road upgrades would help traffic flow, that property values wouldn't be affected, and that the store would mean convenience.

The area's representative in the Planning Commission, Dawn Davis, said if the County Commission decides for the project, it should make it dependent on 21 design and service conditions, including brick building walls on all sides, moderate exterior lighting and deliveries only between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution 9/2/2004

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Crowd forces delay of Wal-Mart review

GREG MOBERLY, Times-Herald staff writer                 [back to top]
Wednesday, September 01, 2004

AMERICAN CANYON - An elementary school multipurpose room proved the wrong fit for what seemed likely to be contentious debate on a proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter on Tuesday night.

Almost an hour after the scheduled American Canyon Planning Commission meeting was to begin, city officials said the meeting would be rescheduled because the blocked aisles were a fire hazard.

More than 250 citizens packed into the Donaldson Way Elementary School multipurpose room, standing in the doorway aisle and up against the side walls because most of the metal folding chairs were taken.

As city leaders grappled with what to do, some citizens began chanting slogans and their own preferences. Some chanted "Not fair!" and later shouted "Reschedule!"

Fire Chief Keith Caldwell and City Attorney William D. Ross told the crowd they couldn't start the meeting with the aisles blocked. "Residents only," numerous citizens at the back of the room chanted.

With hardly anyone leaving, the doorway aisle remained blocked and at about 8:20 p.m., Ross announced the meeting would be postponed until 6:30 p.m. Sept. 9 at the Community Gym on Barton Way. That facility has a capacity of about 460, officials said.

"I think that was horrible," said American Canyon resident Simone Shipman, adding she believed a group of anti-Wal-Mart citizens wanted to shut down the meeting intentionally.

Ross said officials had consulted with other California cities that had contentious discussions on proposed Wal-Marts, including Apple Valley and Gilroy. Based on those discussions, the city was expecting about 150 residents, he said.

"It's not like we picked this building out of the blue," Ross said.

Steve Macdonald of American Canyon said city officials didn't think about the venue as carefully as they should have because there was significant controversy leading up to the meeting.

City Manager Mark Joseph said the city had no choice but to continue the meeting. "We can't tell half the crowd to go home (or rotate)," Joseph said.

Ray Marcus, a City Council candidate, said there were people at the meeting who had no business attending. "There's quite a few outsiders (here)," Marcus said. "It's not an outsiders' issue."

Marcus said he's in favor of the Wal-Mart Supercenter.

Those who have spoken out against the retail giant argue that the massive store would pay low wages, drive out other businesses, magnify traffic problems and raise crime rates in the community.

Wal-Mart supporters have expressed gratitude that the store could bring more jobs and shopping opportunities to the city.

The only issue the city planning commission can decide on is the design of the Wal-Mart Supercenter. If the commission approves it, the project can move forward. But residents can appeal the decision to the City Council.

The City Council approved building some form of a "big box" store at the site last year, before a specific retailer's name was attached. The design, submitted by an engineering firm on behalf of Wal-Mart, includes a 173,653-square-foot building with a 12,676-square-foot garden center adjacent to it.

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Wal-Mart drops plans for S. Side store

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter - Chicago Sun Times              [back to top]
August 31, 2004

Wal-Mart's contract to build a second Chicago store on the South Side has expired, and the nation's largest retailer chose not to renew it amid concern about minimum wage and benefit standards that may be imposed on "big-box" stores.

"It's not about a living-wage issue. It's about an ordinance that singles out just some -- not all -- businesses in Chicago," said Wal-Mart spokesman John Bisio.

"We wanted to defer the discussion until we got a better sense of how this big-box thing was going. We're just not comfortable committing considerable capital investment to a site when we don't know if we're going to be able to operate in Chicago. The developer, rather than extending our contract, decided to go ahead with the [zoning] vote. It's not our call. The project is going ahead without us."

The proposed South Side Wal-Mart at the site of the old Ryerson Steel plant at 83rd and Stewart is not the only project in jeopardy. So is the West Side Wal-Mart at 1657 N. Kilpatrick that aldermen have already approved, Bisio said.

"We're going to continue to work in good faith toward accomplishing the things we want to do on the West Side project -- identifying local minority contractors and important causes in the 37th Ward. But, the reality is that, with these big-box ordinances looming, it could have an impact on whether or not we're able to go through with that project, as well," he said.

Ald. Howard Brookins (21st) acknowledged that the South Side project "can't go forward without two major anchors, and the only one firmly committed is Lowes" Home Improvement.

Rezoning vote still on

Still, Brookins said, he plans to forge ahead with Wednesday's vote to rezone the property from industrial to commercial. The project calls for a $33 million tax-increment financing (TIF) subsidy to cover environmental cleanup and infrastructure costs.

"We need it cleaned up, whether it's going to be a Wal-Mart, a Kmart, a golf course or a playground," Brookins said.

But, he added, "If this is the effect that big-box ordinances have on business, we're probably cutting off our noses to spite our face."

Earlier this year, a bitterly divided City Council handed Wal-Mart a split decision: zoning approval to build its first Chicago store in the West Side's Austin community and a one-vote defeat in Chatham.

The vote followed an acrimonious debate. Since then, a pair of ordinances have been introduced aimed at establishing a minimum wage and benefit standard for Wal-Mart and other "big box" retailers.

Brookins said he can't help but wonder what might have happened if he hadn't fallen one vote short the first time around.

"It would have been plugging along. Wal-Mart would have been on the hook, and even if the big-box ordinances passed, they would have been stuck. Now, they can wiggle out of both of them and nobody gets anything," he said.

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Wal-Mart design up for review

DAN JUDGE - Times-Herald staff writer    [back to top]
Monday, August 30, 2004

AMERICAN CANYON - The Planning Commission will be asked to give its blessing to the design of a controversial Wal-Mart Supercenter at a special meeting of the board Tuesday.

The session will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Donaldson Way Elementary School multipurpose room to accommodate a larger-than-normal crowd that is expected to show up to debate the project.

Planning officials say those who want the store rejected, however, will most likely have to find the devil in the details - design flaws.

Permission to build some form of "big box" store at the site was given by the City Council last year, before a specific retailer's name was attached.

"Whether we are going to have a large-box facility was approved in December of 2003," Planning Director Ed Haworth said. "The condition for evaluating this project (at Tuesday's meeting) is design review only."

The proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter, which would include a grocery store that would operate 24 hours a day, would be part of the Napa Junction retail center being built on the east side of Highway 29 by Napa-based developer Lake Street Ventures.

The center is designed as a 40-acre mixed-use project that would include stores, restaurants, business offices, 216 apartment units and a "town green" park. The Wal-Mart would serve as the anchor tenant.

The Napa Junction master plan has already been approved, as well as the design review for the apartments. Their construction is expected to begin immediately.

The project drew little criticism until city officials confirmed that a Wal-Mart Supercenter was being courted as the primary tenant.

Many residents have spoken out against the retail giant, arguing that the massive store would pay low wages, drive out other businesses, magnify traffic problems and raise crime rates in the community.

A legion of supporters have also stepped forward, expressing gratitude for more shopping opportunities in the city.

Developer Vincent "Buzz" Butler expressed frustration at criticism of the Wal-Mart component of the project.

"We're still in a market that's a very thin market," he said. "Without an anchor, you're going to attract marginal businesses like gas stations and fast food. With Wal-Mart as an anchor, the caliber of retailers we can attract is wonderful."

The design, submitted by an engineering firm on behalf of Wal-Mart, includes a 173,653-square foot building with a 12,676-square foot garden center adjacent to it.

The "main street" feel being promoted in the entire Napa Junction project would be continued through the Wal-Mart portion via a 20-foot wide scored concrete sidewalk along the building's front. In addition, the project includes trees on the street and decorative grates, benches, tables, chairs and light fixtures.

"The proposed architectural design would convey a high level of design quality, as required by the general plan, by incorporating varying roof elements and building forms to visually break up the building's front elevation," the planning report states.

Wal-Mart is also asking to exceed the city's 50-square-foot limit on signs with a 120-square-foot monument sign to provide better visibility from Highway 29.

The project would be accessed from the south through a new traffic signal at Highway 29 and Eucalyptus Drive, from the west by Highway 29 and from Napa Junction Road to the north.

The planning director also pointed out that the city has imposed 86 conditions of approval on the Wal-Mart design review from landscaping to street improvements.

As part of those conditions, the city has required that Wal-Mart provide the city a $50,000 fund to cover the costs of its own potential code violations.

The special meeting of the Planning Commission will be held at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Donaldson Way Elementary School, 430 Donaldson Way in American Canyon.

Anyone interested in viewing the full Planning Department report on Wal-Mart can do so on the Web at http://www.ci.american-canyon.ca.us

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Wal-Mart Rejects Proposed Location In Northeast D.C.

By Michael Barbaro - Washington Post                               [back to top]
August 28, 204

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. yesterday said it would scrap plans to build its first District store in Northeast after senior executives at the company visited the proposed site in the Brentwood neighborhood and found it did not meet their requirements.

The decision, which executives made late yesterday at Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Ark., headquarters, stunned city leaders and developers, who had courted the retailer for years and hoped its arrival in Northeast would spark an economic revival in the neighborhood.

Wal-Mart had reached the final stages of negotiations to build a 100,000-square-foot store at the Rhode Island Place shopping center. All that remained was final approval from top company executives, who flew into the District this week to review the site, people familiar with the talks said.

"It floors me. We had almost everyone on board," said one developer involved in the deal, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss the negotiations.

Wal-Mart gave no detailed explanation of why it rejected the site, but two people with direct knowledge of the talks said the small size of the site and parking lot in the Rhode Island Place shopping center were two major factors.

Mia T. Masten, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said that "after reviewing the site and evaluating our operational needs, we decided the site does not meet the requirements to best serve our customers." For now, she said, the chain has no alternative location in the District in mind.

Masten said the chain, which has 27 stores in the region but none inside the Capital Beltway, will work with the mayor and the city council to find a new site. "Wal-Mart remains very interested in the Washington, D.C., market," she said.

Executives with the project's two private developers, Graimark/Walker Urban Development LLC and MidCity Urban LLC, did not return phone messages last night.

Chris Bender, a spokesman for the city's office of planning and economic development, said the company's decision is "disappointing."

At-large D.C. Council member Harold Brazil urged developers to find a replacement for Wal-Mart. "There is real demand for discount goods in the city," he said.

The District originally owned the Brentwood property, at one point using it as a lot for impounded cars. But it sold the property to developers in 2001. Still, city leaders repeatedly met with retailers to encourage development on the site.

Kmart planned to move into the 23-acre site, but that project failed when the retailer filed for Chapter 11 protection from its creditors in 2002. But because of Kmart's efforts, the site is already zoned for retail and is physically prepared for construction, which would have made it possible for Wal-Mart to move quickly.

Still, the proposed site, near the Rhode Island Avenue Metro stop, would have been an unusual one for Wal-Mart.

A relatively small space, it already contains a Giant Food and Home Depot, and Wal-Mart would have been forced to squeeze into a 100,000-square-foot space. The chain typically builds stores with about 130,000 square feet. What's more, the parcel of land is raised, making it difficult to expand parking, which was limited.

"The site was tight to begin with," said a developer who worked on the deal. "Wal-Mart always wanted a bigger store."

The decision to jettison plans for the Brentwood site heads off a growing confrontation between Wal-Mart and several neighborhood groups, activist organizations, and unions trying to block or slow the deal.

The groups range in size from a two-week-old neighborhood organization of 15 residents calling itself DC Citizens for Responsible Growth to the 150,000-member Metropolitan Washington Council of the AFL-CIO, which represents 180 local unions.

In letters to council members and the mayor, activist and resident organizations have demanded negotiations be halted until city leaders hold public hearings on the potential impact of a Wal-Mart store in the city.

"I am thrilled," said Heather Phipps, one the founders of DC Citizens for Responsible Growth. "Whether it was a small parking lot or activists that made this happen, I am glad we no longer have to fight off Wal-Mart."

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Wal-Mart set on Supercenter project

By Sarah Krupp - STAFF WRITER                          [back to top]
Fri, Aug. 27, 2004

ANTIOCH - Wal-Mart is moving ahead with plans to turn its Antioch store into the Bay Area's first grocery-vending Supercenter despite budding opposition.

Although the Lone Tree Way Wal-Mart has approvals dating back to 1998 for a grocery section, company officials didn't begin working on the addition until recently. The company is designing the new building, which will be on the northern side of the existing store, city officials said.

It's unclear exactly how large the addition will be but Antioch's store is 130,000 square-feet and supercenters are usually 200,000 square-feet, according to Eric Berger, a Wal-Mart spokesman.

Because the Antioch store has prior approval to sell groceries, it's likely that the only city review necessary for construction to start will be the endorsement of the design review board, said City Planner Nina Oshinsky. If the impacts are substantial, it may require City Council approval, she added.

"The way it's set up now, when they came in 1988 they provided a list of proposed uses. Assuming their design is OK, the grocery would be permitted and that would be the end of it," Oshinsky said.

Berger said that the expansion would roughly double the number of employees to more than 400.

The only Wal-Mart Supercenter in the state is in southern California. But the company is looking to put several in the Central Valley. In some cases, however, they face legal and political challenges.

Antioch's expansion may face similar obstacles. Already some residents and the local food workers union are gearing up for a fight.

Berger said that prior approvals should clear the way for the grocery store.

"We feel that as long as we work with the city and present a plan that meets their requirements that we expect to be able to expand," he said.

But residents living near Wal-Mart have started to organize, said Clinton Fields of Citizens for a Better Antioch, a grass-roots, slow-growth group.

"They don't want more delivery trucks coming in at night and they don't want the traffic," Fields said.

He added that the national chain pays poorly and doesn't provide health benefits to many of its employees.

Berger said Wal-Mart treats its workers well.

"Our average hourly wage in the San Francisco area is $11.08," Berger said. "Generally, when we open new stores we have hundreds if not thousands of applicants."

The United Food and Commercial Workers Union is teaming up with residents. They say that the neighborhood Wal-Mart is in is saturated with grocery stores.

"We oppose putting another grocery store in East County of that size when you have five major supermarkets within a 4.5 square-miles radius," said Phil Tucker, special project representative for UFCW Local 1179.

"With all these stores competing with each other, it depresses the hours for workers in all stores," he added.

Councilman Jim Conley, however, believes that the majority of Antioch residents support Wal-Mart's expansion. He cited the defeat of the county ballot measure aimed at banning such supercenters as proof. The March ballot issue, Measure L, would have kept in place a county ordinance banning big box stores unincorporated areas that dedicate more than 5 percent of their space to groceries.

"Seniors, people on welfare, they need to be able to take care of their family just like you and I do," Conley said. "If you wanted to pay top dollar on everything, you wouldn't have Macy's, you would just go to Nordstrom."

Attention Shoppers

Attention, Shoppers After years of circling, the "beast of Bentonville" is closing in on the Bay Area. Its foes have been sharpening their fangs, too. Clara Jeffery analyzes Wal-Mart's intentions, its opposition, and why this fall is a turning point.

Compared with more recent models, #1615 doesn't look like much. It isn't something you could spot from a few miles down the highway or out an airplane window. It hasn't devoured whole neighborhoods; it's just squeezed into a medium-sized strip mall on the outskirts of Pittsburg, an ethnically mixed, working-class community whose smokestacks, generators, and transmission lines send juice to much of the Bay Area (a billboard as you enter town proclaims "Power for the Future"). A mere 125,000 fluorescently lit square feet, #1615 doesn't contain a full-sized grocery store, though it's large enough to have its own audio microclimates--Prince's "Kiss" is playing in auto parts, while over by juniors the dubious choice is R. Kelly.

But although store #1615 is old-school Wal-Mart--the newer supercenters offer a full line of groceries and are as large as 230,000 square feet, or four football fields--it bears all the other company trademarks. The blue-vested workers Wal-Mart calls associates. Clothes cut for supersized Americans. Installments from the evangelical Left Behind books glut the culture section, which has no hard-core rap or metal CDs. An astonishing depth of random products, like 15 styles of athletic mouth guards. Odd vestiges of the company's rural roots; along with BB guns and rifle scopes, #1615 sells a beginners' guide to taxidermy.

Atop every display, signs blare, "Always Low Prices" and "You Will Be Satisfied." Omnipresent "Rollback" smiley faces grin menacingly, making you feel you're being watched. And you are: Overhead, scores of eyes-in-the-sky hang from the ceiling tiles, ready to catch shoplifters or employees stealing time between breaks by chatting or resting.

After about an hour of wandering the aisles, I spend $108.87. For this I get a pair of cotton pants, a T-shirt, a giant plastic storage bin, windshield wipers, Rain-X, Armor All wipes, a vise-grip wrench, a wall clock, an extension cord, two packs of Swiffer wipes, sunscreen, a hat, and seven other items, including a souvenir smiley face do-rag. Not a bad haul. On the way out the door, after my bag is rigorously checked against the receipt, I say hello to "greeter" Betty Dukes. I just spent a little more than she earns in an eight-hour shift.

An attractive African American in her mid-50s, Dukes looks familiar, for a reason: As the lead plaintiff in the biggest sex discrimination class-action suit in history, her picture has appeared in publications from the Chronicle to People and Fortune. She finds herself in an odd position. She's the very public face of opposition to Wal-Mart, a corporation so enormous that if it were a country it would have the 20th-largest gross domestic product in the world. But here in Pittsburg, she's also the very face the company wants to put forth: friendly, homey--she calls out to customers with a "Hello again" and "Come back for something else?"--in a word, welcoming. Dukes went to work for Wal-Mart in 1994; despite almost two decades of retail experience, her starting salary was $5 an hour. Over the next decade, Dukes says, she was passed over for promotion again and again, and she suspected her male coworkers were making more than she was. But despite the way she says the company has treated her and its hundreds of thousands of other past and present female employees, she has no immediate plans to quit working there or stop shopping its aisles. "I gotta live," she says simply. All she wants is to be treated fairly.

In some ways, this modest goal is beginning to be realized. Since Dukes and her fellow plaintiffs filed suit, the chain has started posting job openings internally, she says, and raises are now pegged to performance reviews. A year and a half ago, before her lawyers presented a federal judge with data showing how much less the company pays women than it pays men, Dukes made $8.86 an hour. Now she gets $12.48 an hour.

But even with a nearly 50 percent raise, Dukes grosses just under $26,000 a year. In this, one of the most expensive places in the world to live, whether she earns the same as an underpaid male coworker almost seems beside the point; how is anyone supposed to survive on a salary like that?

By shopping at Wal-Mart, of course.

Over the past decade or so, in the minds of many people, Wal-Mart has emerged as something bigger than the most successful retailer in history. It's the "beast of Bentonville," destroying small towns, destabilizing local economies, desecrating the environment, and exploiting workers around the world--a symbol of everything that's wrong with corporate America. Nowhere is that perception stronger than in places like San Francisco. Yet in these parts, anti-Wal-Mart fervor has largely been an intellectual exercise. Of the retailer's 3,580 or so stores, just 10 are in the Bay Area--nothing compared with its ubiquity in the South or Midwest. Thus far, the state's liberal politics, tight environmental and land-use regulations, and powerful unions have kept Wal-Mart more or less at bay. But that's about to change.

For, having conquered most of rural and exurb America, Wal-Mart sees cities, and California, and in particular California cities, as its manifest destiny. Statewide, it has announced plans to build 40 supercenters in the next four years, plus an undisclosed number of "regular" stores like the one in Pittsburg. In the Bay Area, regular stores are slated for Richmond, Fremont, San Jose, Oakland, and at least four other locations; supercenters are planned for Antioch, Gilroy, Tracy, and American Canyon. If Wal-Mart's history is any indication, that's just the beginning of the onslaught.

The anti-Wal-Mart forces are ready. Against the enormous corporation stands a loose coalition of city and county supervisors--anti-box store legislation specifically aimed at Wal-Mart has been tried in San Francisco, Oakland, Contra Costa County, and elsewhere, with mixed success--lawyers, urban planners, traffic watchdogs, environmentalists, immigrant-rights groups, and antisweatshop activists. Wal-Mart has caused the most unlikely groups to band together. Living wage and welfare reform advocates, for example, both contend that because so many of the company's employees qualify for food stamps and so few can afford its health care plan, states subsidize each worker to the tune of $2,100 a year. Miss America 1992, Carolyn Sapp, has allied herself with mainstream feminists, speaking at a National Organization for Women rally about Wal-Mart's "socioeconomic abuse" of its employees.

But Wal-Mart's best organized, most dedicated opponents are unions. When the specter of nonunionized supercenters caused grocery store chains in Southern California to demand wage and benefit concessions from the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the result was a nasty 139-day strike that idled 70,000 employees and shook the economy of the entire region. Negotiations between Bay Area supermarkets and the UFCW are currently under way--the average supercenter worker earns half as much in salary and benefits as the typical grocery chain employee around here--but if those fail, 20,000 to 25,000 workers in our area could be walking out this fall.

This being California, the battle over Wal-Mart is also finding its way onto the November ballot, with numerous state and local measures designed to curtail where and how the company does business. Some of these fights will get ugly. "They've identified a strategy of urban expansion, and they're not walking away from it," says Howard Davidowitz, chairman of New York-based retail consulting firm Davidowitz & Associates. He notes that Wal-Mart has aggressively fought every California jurisdiction that has tried to limit its expansion, not so much because it is determined to build any one store as because it is determined to challenge any impediment to its way of doing business. Davidowitz calls these hardball tactics "lay[ing] down the marker": "Wal-Mart is saying they've identified a new market and they're going to move in and attack."

For such a huge and far-flunG operation, Wal-Mart has remained remarkably insular and centralized. To reach the home office, you fly into the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport, on the outskirts of Bentonville in the Ozark Mountains; despite the town's puny size (population 19,730), the six-year-old airport already offers 53 flights a day, including 14 nonstops to major cities. The 12-mile drive to the Wal-Mart complex takes you past a string of budget motels where nervous vendors sweat it out before pitch meetings with company buyers. The campus consists of a supercenter, a distribution center, and a four-story, largely windowless brick and concrete building. From this ungainly headquarters emanates a corporate culture that is both extremely successful (Wal-Mart has topped Fortune's list of most admired companies two years in a row) and extraordinarily competitive. Several times a week, staffers at every store are called together and told how their departments rank against similar departments nationwide. Every Thursday, all 36 regional vice presidents are required to return to Bentonville to attend three mornings of meetings, which focus on two things: how to keep costs low, and how to grow, grow, grow.

Which brings us back to California, where in rare cases, Wal-Mart has been rebuffed, most notably by the largely black and Hispanic Los Angeles neighborhood of Inglewood. Wal-Mart muscled a 71-page initiative onto the ballot this past April that would have bypassed city officials and allowed construction of a supercenter without any environmental or traffic studies or public hearings. The retailer mounted a vigorous PR campaign focusing on job creation for the low-income area. It handed out doughnuts and provided taxi rides to the polls. But opponents fought back, and voters overwhelmingly rejected the measure.

According to Wal-Mart spokesman Peter Kanelos, "the vote in Inglewood was basically a vote not against Wal-Mart but a vote against the perception that Wal-Mart was circumventing the City Council. We had every right to take this to the voters, but the information that was given to the voters by our critics"--whom Kanelos contends are chiefly unions and supermarkets fearful of competition--"was not accurate. I think in the future we will make every effort to take a different approach."

Mostly, though, their approach has worked just fine. Take Contra Costa County. This past spring, after the Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance that effectively barred building supercenters on unincorporated land, Wal-Mart--which claimed it did not want to build on such land--nonetheless spent an estimated $2 million (according to local papers) on a ballot measure to overturn the ban. It's hard to say what tipped the issue in Wal-Mart's favor--the confusing yes-means-no language of the referendum, which the retailer drafted; glossy mailings that accused county supervisors of trying to limit consumer choice; a reported three-to-one spending edge over opponents. But for whatever reason-and the allure of $5.87 T-shirts and other cheap consumer goods surely played a role, along with the county's relatively conservative bent--Contra Costa voters sided with Wal-Mart by a comfortable margin.

Add to the retailer's deep pockets one other huge advantage: fiscal desperation. "The sales tax structure in the state of California is holding a gun to the municipalities' heads," says Nick Norquist, producer of the documentary Bigger Boxes (shown periodically on KQED). Because of Proposition 13, which limits property tax increases, he says, "sales taxes are their only real way to generate revenue."

Norquist, who's quick to tell me he's a "pro-business guy, much more to the right of the political spectrum," says Wal-Mart presents communities with rosy pictures of the tax revenue a store will generate, even though a number of well-regarded academic studies have found that after an initial bump, sales taxes frequently flatten out, often accompanied by a net loss in wages. This is simple economics, argues Norquist--a Wal-Mart doesn't cause shoppers to spend more money, they just spend more of it in one place. "If I go to a little mom-and-pop down the street, the city is going to reap the sales-tax revenue over and over and over again as that money recirculates in the community," he contends. "But if I go to Wal-Mart, the lion's share of that money goes back to Bentonville. So this idea that Wal-Mart is a big sales tax boon to a city is somewhat of a myth."

Often, a city doles out a considerable amount to lure Wal-Mart to town. An analysis of 91 subsidy deals nationwide found that the average store received $2.8 million in government assistance, such as free land, property tax breaks, and sales tax abatements. The study, largely funded by the UFCW, also found that 90 percent of Wal-Mart's distribution centers are subsidized. Cities enter into such deals assuming they'll earn back their investment in the form of taxes, but as officials in Riverside County's Cathedral City found, there are no guarantees.

Back in 1992, the city agreed to reimburse Wal-Mart for $1.8 million in infrastructure costs, using sales tax revenue generated by the retailer. Last year, just as the city had cleared that debt and started to receive its full share of taxes, it found out that Wal-Mart was closing its two stores in town and opening a supercenter in nearby Palm Desert--something that Vice Mayor Gregory Pettis says he and other officials learned from the evening news. The city, which lost many small businesses when Wal-Mart came to town, now faces the loss of $800,000 a year in sales taxes; other tenants in the shopping center that Wal-Mart anchored may also flee. "There has been no net gain to Cathedral City by having them here," says Pettis. "There has been a loss on the front end; there's going to be a significant loss on the back end. This is happening across the country. Not that that makes me feel any better; it just doesn't make me feel alone."

Bay Area communities should take note, says Phil Tucker, a spokesman for UFCW Local 1179. "They're going to use the same pattern here they used in the Midwest to kill businesses and then close their stores and consolidate the business into a store that's the most profitable and most central. There's a pattern that's been followed all the way from Bentonville, Arkansas, to the Pacific Ocean." Nationwide, at least 370 Wal-Mart stores stood empty as of February, the retailer acknowledges (it shies away from the term "closed").

Asked if Wal-Mart intentionally oversaturates new markets, Kanelos responds, "It is not oversaturation. That is the wrong premise. We have an obligation to meet our customers' needs. We are just meeting the demand and offering better services." He adds, "We have not closed stores in California--we just relocate them." To date, he says, Wal-Mart has "relocated" no more than five stores around the state.

But Pettis wishes Cathedral City had been less naive. Dealing with Wal-Mart, he says, has been "devastating." Asked what he'd tell other cities considering doing business with the retail giant, he is adamant: "They need to say no!"

But the issue that's starting to get a lot of attention across the economic and political spectrum is taxpayer subsidies for Wal-Mart workers. Because the company pays so little--according to a brand-new UC Berkeley study, the California average for workers is $9.70 an hour, or $18,158 a year for a typical 36-hour workweek, 31 percent below the statewide average for large retailers--employees turn to government for everything from health care to housing assistance to food stamps. The study found that fewer than half of Wal-Mart employees in the state are insured by the company (versus an industry norm of 61 percent), and that the average Wal-Mart worker receives 39 percent more in public assistance than employees at other California retailers. A national report by Democratic congressman George Miller of Martinez claims that for each store employing 200 people, taxpayers must fork over $420,750 a year; the Berkeley analysis put the statewide total at $86 million a year.

"That is what makes me nuts," says Norquist. "When I go through the checkout counter, I want to pay everything it costs to deliver those goods. Because at heart, I'm a free marketer. If Wal-Mart builds a better mousetrap, if all the costs of those goods are captured when I go through the checkout line and they can deliver that at a lower cost, that's America. But when you start shifting costs to the public sector, it's inherently unfair competition."

The UFCW's Tucker says he understands why people, especially cash-strapped families, shop at Wal-Mart. But he argues that what makes the company so threatening is that it guarantees its own marketplace by creating an "underclass society." (The retailer now employs one out of every 115 U.S. workers; according to the Berkeley study, if other California retailers adopted Wal-Mart's wage and benefit standards, taxpayers would be on the hook for an additional $410 million a year.) Carolyn Sapp, the Miss America who's taken it upon herself to promote the sex discrimination issue through her L.A.-based nonprofit Wal-Mart Versus Women, is among the outraged. She once saw an employee handbook in which "they actually showed how to go on social services, welfare! Right there, we should put our foot down."

Wal-Mart is reportedly facing more than 8,000 lawsuits of various kinds. But individual suits are like gnats, and Wal-Mart has the resources to bury a lone plaintiff in paper and postponements (its annual revenue last year was $267 billion, more than California's entire 2004-05 budget). With Betty Dukes v. Wal-Mart, the retailer now faces a formidable opponent: a coalition of attorneys with the means and experience to inflict serious pain.

The case began in 2000 when Santa Fe lawyers who'd successfully litigated individual sexual harassment cases against Wal-Mart came to Berkeley attorney Brad Seligman with what they knew about the retailer's employment practices. Though he's hardly a household name, for two decades Seligman has been one of the country's most feared attorneys specializing in workers' rights and class actions. He had a hand in several of the largest discrimination cases in recent years, including a $240 million accord with State Farm and a $107 million settlement with Lucky Stores. But at the age of 40, feeling frustrated by the limits of what private law firms can do, he left his Oakland practice, took $1.25 million of his winnings, and, in 1992, founded the Impact Fund. The nonprofit has since handed out $3.6 million and provided other forms of assistance to public-interest lawyers involved in environmental, civil rights, and similar causes; for example, it helped pay for the campaign against Wal-Mart's ballot measure in Inglewood.

And, when the stakes are high enough, it gets into the game directly. "We picked Wal-Mart because there is no single company where a suit can make more of a positive effect," Seligman says, "not just because of its own massive size, but because it makes the labor market. What happens to it ripples across everybody else. And because it is so uniquely centralized, this is one of the relatively rare cases where you can get a national class."

To battle Wal-Mart, Seligman put together a coalition of private lawyers and nonprofit groups, such as San Francisco-based Equal Rights Advocates. The coalition sought out potential plaintiffs across the country; some, like Betty Dukes, had called ERA for advice. It analyzed federal employment data. By 2001, it decided it had enough ammunition to file suit.

Once the discovery process began, Wal-Mart was forced to hand over 1.3 million documents, as well as the electronic payroll and personnel data for every single employee since 1996. So, for example, Seligman could draw up the records of Barbara Ehrenreich, who in 2000 worked for a Wal-Mart in Minnesota while researching her book Nickel and Dimed, which chronicled the lives of low-wage workers. "Men hired at the same time were getting paid more than her," he says. "I thought it was hilarious. She may yet be a witness in this case." ("This was not my get-rich-quick scheme," Ehrenreich jokes. But she's watching with interest, "tiny though my share will be.")

Even when the data was controlled for a variety of factors, it showed that the company pays women an average of 5 to 15 percent less than it pays men and routinely passes them over for promotion (only 34 percent of its managers are women, versus an industry norm of 56 percent). Stats like these are what led U.S. District Judge Martin Jenkins of San Francisco to certify the suit as a class action--the African American judge pointedly cited Brown v. Board of Education in his June ruling--and to expand it to include at least 1.6 million women, making it the largest employment suit ever.

The discovery process also turned up internal memos noting the problem and commenting on how much better Wal-Mart's competitors were at promoting women. "Knowing about it, they've chosen to do nothing," argues Seligman. "That's the kind of evidence that supports a level of intentionality," he says, adding that while the plaintiffs don't have to prove intent, doing so would let them seek punitive damages.

Wal-Mart has appealed the class-action certification, but if it loses, Seligman expects that the prospect of a Bay Area jury may prompt the company--famous for not settling cases--to enter into "some very serious discussions." But, he adds, "whether or not they're willing to go where I want them to go" is an open question. "Having come this far, we have a very aggressive stance toward them. The thing about Wal-Mart, money is a big deal, but more important to them--clearly, their pathology--is losing control. And one of the irreducible settlement demands that we've made is that they'd have to submit to federal oversight jurisdiction for the long term."

"Ughh," says American Canyon's normally even-keeled city manager, Mark Joseph, when asked how the publicity surrounding Dukes v. Wal-Mart has affected the town's plans to build a supercenter. "Between the campaign season and the suit, the timing was not good." On July 14, soon after city officials informed the community that a supercenter was going to be the anchor tenant of their new Napa Junction development, scores of angry locals made their case--that the company would destroy nearby businesses, depress wages, increase crime, and drastically impact traffic on Highway 29--at an open forum where Wal-Mart's architects, economists, and traffic analysts were making theirs. Joseph insists that because the company has agreed to build something much more aesthetically pleasing than the standard box store, Wal-Mart will create a downtown for his 12-year-old community. What's more, AmCan has offered Wal-Mart no subsidies, tax holidays, or fee waivers. "I'd like to think it was because we're shrewd negotiators, but there were no concessions," he says, probably because Wal-Mart has faced so much opposition elsewhere in California. Joseph adds, "I don't want to take the political heat of a Wal-Mart and not get all the money!"

The rapidly growing city faces the usual money crunch, and it just lost a lumberyard that provided a huge chunk of its sales tax revenue. Even though groceries aren't taxed in California, Wal-Mart has nevertheless told Joseph the supercenter "would produce around $600,000 a year in our share of the tax, which, you know, I have no reason to doubt. I mean, it seems like a phenomenal amount, but I'm assuming they're being honest with us."

"If Mark would just do a little digging--Hello! Google 'Wal-Mart'!"--he would find that other California communities have sued when Wal-Mart's projections have turned out to be pie-in-the-sky, counters AmCan resident Cindy Coffey. Coffey, who's planning to run for City Council this fall, is also head of American Canyon Community United for Responsible Growth, which has gathered about 1,500 signatures opposing Wal-Mart's new store. Based on what's happened elsewhere, predicts Coffey, a supercenter in AmCan will mean the closing of a Vallejo Wal-Mart less than a mile away. (Company spokesman Kanelos denies this.) "The Safeway will go out of business, which then will affect all the retail in that strip center, and the Food 4 Less will probably close," Coffey claims. "So here we are, the gateway to the Napa Valley, and we will have three empty big box stores."

Joseph says he's sensitive to the worries of the Safeway and its employees, but he points out that unemployment is low and Wal-Mart will have to compete by offering higher wages. Wal-Mart is planning additional stores in the Vallejo area, so evidently it thinks the market can bear them all. He points out that if state voters defeat Proposition 72 on the November ballot, Wal-Mart and other large companies could be required to provide health care benefits to their workers. But he also points out that social service costs are picked up at the county or state level, though he feels "Machiavellian" for even saying so.

Actually, Joseph seems anything but Machiavellian. He's just one small-town official who, lacking a city development agency or bevy of independent experts, is trying to find his place in Wal-Mart's world. As will we all. The California battles uniting lawyers, unions, and former beauty queens have shown that the opposition to Wal-Mart is increasingly organized. But these adversaries don't underestimate their foes--not just Wal-Mart, but an entire consumer culture addicted to inexpensive goods. "I think it is going to be an important part of what the left, progressives, do for the next decade or so," says Barbara Ehrenreich. "It's going to have to be a movement made with many pieces--the environmental piece, the labor piece, the woman part....I mean, it's so huge. Maybe it's convenient to have it all rolled into one store."

Retail analyst Davidowitz, on the other hand, doesn't see Wal-Mart's world as such a terrible place. "They're a company that's been focused on delivering lower prices to consumers and making a blood fortune for themselves," he says "I can think of nothing better in a capitalist society. And that's what we're in. If you don't like it, go to France and have 12 percent unemployment." As for the future, "sure, they're going to develop a corporate strategy to be a little cuddlier. Because they think they have to. But at the end of the day, Wal-Mart is going to go forward just as they always have. There's going to be a rejection here and a rejection there, and they're going to get the stores they need to get. End of sentence." Kanelos agrees: "We're going to meet our goal of 40 new supercenters in the next four years. Proof is in the pudding." Clara Jeffery is the deputy editor of Mother Jones.

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A new twist in the Wal-Mart wars

By: Daniel B. Wood                         [back to top]
The Christian Science Monitor
08/12/2004

(LOS ANGELES) Proponents say it may become a national model for handling skirmishes over so-called "big box" stores moving into economically fragile communities.

Opponents call it another thinly veiled attempt by pro-labor legislators to stand in the way of stores like Wal-Mart and Costco, fearing the stores' low wages and low costs.

Still others see the new ordinance, given initial approval this week by the Los Angeles City Council, as more evidence of a deadlock between America's largest employer, Wal-Mart, and its largest state, California, over the store's future and its policies.

The ordinance, voted on Wednesday, says simply that developers of superstores (those over 100,000 square feet) must do cost/benefit analyses to assess their economic impacts. Beyond the current practice of "conditional use" permits - which hinge on parking, land, and pollution impacts - applicants would have to assess a new list of controversial concerns, using approved but independent consultants.

The key concerns include potential business displacement, housing and open-space effects, impact on city revenues, job creation or loss, and access to low-cost goods. Such concerns have been at the heart of battles nationwide, as Wal-Mart has expanded to more than 1,500 supercenters.

"We don't see this as something that tries to stand in the way of a train [driven by the incoming stores], but rather a way to divert the whole procedure to a different track," says City Councilman Eric Garcetti, chief proponent of the ordinance. That track, he says, is a straightforward discussion and more formal approval process with residents' input.

In battles across the state and elsewhere, Mr. Garcetti and others say that up to now, the first casualty has been the truth.

The ordinance is "a great idea because it would've prevented the whole ugly campaign here that pitted neighbor against neighbor in a war of propaganda on both sides," says Eliot Petty, a Los Angeles resident who lived through a citizen referendum this year. Barraged by Wal-Mart's TV ads (touting new jobs and tax revenue) and hordes of activists (claiming the ruination of local retail), Inglewood residents eventually said "no" to Wal-Mart's proposal. But the community's polarization remains.

"People here wanted development, but not at the expense of others," says Mr. Petty, "and it would've been nice to have a way to make a more rational decision."

Proponents favor the new measure because, unlike other legislative attempts, it doesn't attempt an outright ban. In the past, proposed bans - circumvented by store-backed referendums - never came to fruition. Supporters also call the new measure a useful planning tool to ensure responsible development, acknowledging that each community has different issues at stake - and it offers a means, too, of protecting cities' own long-term investments in their economic development.

If all goes well, it may be a way to combat outcomes like that in northern California's Cathedral City, where a new Wal-Mart Supercenter put several local retailers out of business - and then, when it moved to a new location, left the city with a vastly depleted retail tax base.

Even opponents of the ordinance call it a victory of sorts: After all, it falls short of banning the big-box stores or restricting their sales of groceries. Still, many balk at the idea of new restrictions.

"This is just additional red tape that will put a cramp on businesses moving to L.A.," says Wal-Mart spokesman Peter Kanelos. He says Wal Mart will marshal resources "to make these economic-impact studies are applied fairly and equitably across the board."

While some fear a new level of statistics battles and survey wars once reports are completed, others, like Petty, say independent analyses could help both sides make rational decisions.

"There is some history of both sides making different claims in situations like these," says Ken Jacobs, author of a just-released report ("Hidden Cost of Wal-Mart Jobs") for the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education. "But the inclusion of these new reviews really does change the equation.... In the process, facts come out on both sides which require study. It's the same way you buy a car, choose a home or school - you ask what are the costs and benefits are and weigh those. It's good public policy."

(c) Copyright 2004 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

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Wal-Mart Hiring Pros And Ex-Cons

Dan Ackman - Forbes.com                       [back to top]
August 12, 2004

NEW YORK - Wal-Mart Stores, the nation's largest employer, says it will start instituting criminal background checks on its prospective employees.

The company did not say what it would do with the information gleaned from the checks, but it did say it has a policy of refusing to hire anyone who lies on an employment application, and the checks would presumably weed out those who lied about having a criminal record.

Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ) did not say it would not hire ex-convicts, at least not those ex-convicts who were honest about their past crimes. A no-ex-convict policy might be difficult for the Bentonville, Ark., retailing colossus to enforce since Wal-Mart has 1.5 million employees, plans to hire 83,000 new workers a year and has a turnover rate that approaches 50% per year. Last year, the company said it would have to hire 800,000 employees over the next five years--a population roughly the size of San Jose--and even that number looks too low. Just yesterday, its dominance was revealed again as Toys R Us (nyse: TOY - news - people ) said it may quit the toy business, having been beaten down by discounters like Wal-Mart.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has anywhere from 3 million to 4 million ex-convicts, a number that is also growing rapidly. As Wal-Mart provides hundreds of thousands of low-wage, low-skill jobs, the two populations--ex-convicts and prospective Wal-Mart employees--will inevitably intersect in large numbers.

"Across the country, every day, we have hundreds of thousands of trustworthy women and men serving our customers," said Sue Oliver, a Wal-Mart senior vice president, in a statement. "We also believe this will add yet another level of comfort for our customers, many of whom already consider their local Wal-Mart associates as kind of an extended family."

The company's employment practices have come under increasing scrutiny of late. Last fall, federal agents raided 60 or more Wal-Mart stores in an effort to catch cleaning-crew members suspected of being illegal immigrants. Earlier this summer, a federal judge certified a class-action sex-discrimination suit against the retailer, with a class that may include 1.5 million claimants. Wal-Mart denied knowingly hiring contractors who used illegal immigrants. It also denied the sex discrimination charges.

Beyond these systemic issues, the retailer has felt the fallout of two particular incidents where Wal-Mart employees in South Carolina were accused of sexually assaulting young girls. Both of the accused employees had been convicted for sexually related criminal offenses. One of the Wal-Mart employees was convicted again; in the other incident, which allegedly occurred a month ago, charges are pending. Both the victims are suing Wal-Mart.

Conducting background checks can itself be a substantial business, as the checks can cost from $25 to $100 each. Providers of the checks sell them on the idea that they might catch potential pilferers--and it is embezzlement, not violent crimes, that have long driven the urge to check. But recently lawsuits against employers who allegedly engaged in "negligent hiring" of rapists or even murderers, while vary rare, have provided a boost for the checking business as well.

While there is no reliable data on the number of such suits, the same companies who sell the background checks tout what they claim is a growing problem based on what may be isolated incidents. But as with so much else in today's world, it is fear more than reality that is the driving force.

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Sherman's March to Wal-Mart

Thursday, July 22, 2004             [back to top]
Seattle Times
by Froma Harrop

Sherman's army didn't wreck a fraction of the American South being pillaged daily by the big-box store advance. Here in South Carolina's upcountry, the march of Wal-Marts, Targets and the rest are laying waste to 33 acres a day. Hills that nurtured peach trees for generations are buried under yet another Lowe's Home Improvement Center. A new subdivision obliterates all memory of what was a beloved vista.

Longtime residents in the Greenville-Spartanburg area talk of houses popping up from nowhere as though they were foreign invaders. They despair at bulldozers turning prime farmland into big-box moonscapes — and at the traffic congestion that follows the creeping ugliness. What was an eight-minute drive to church now takes 20 minutes. A statewide poll conducted by the University of South Carolina showed that growth is now the No. 1 issue, ahead of education. The people know there's a problem.

But while Americans in other sprawl-prone regions may share these concerns and act, Southerners are paralyzed by their conservative ideology. "Zoning" is a bad word around these parts. When alarmed citizens bring up land-use planning, developers speak darkly of government bureaucrats stomping on property rights. Besides, a new Costco means lower property taxes.

Brad Wyche has to deal with this mentality all the time. He is executive director of Upstate Forever, a group advocating "sensible growth" policies in this part of South Carolina. Wyche recalls attending a public meeting on ways to protect the gorgeous Blue Ridge area from rapid development. There was a form to fill out, Wyche recalls, and one couple wrote at the bottom: "We love the Blue Ridge area as it is. We don't want zoning. Please leave us alone."

"They are trying to have it both ways," Wyche complains. "That attitude is pervasive in the whole South."

If people in these parts are ever going to take a stand, they had better do it fast. Sherman's soldiers had to follow country roads. The developers have Interstate 85. Four of the five most-sprawling metro areas in the nation, according to Smart Growth America, lie along this stretch of highway. (They are Greensboro-Winston-Salem and Raleigh-Durham, in North Carolina; Atlanta; and Greenville-Spartanburg, in South Carolina.)

Environmentalists call for federal programs to fight sprawl. But the developers want matters of land-use planning sent down, down, down to the lowest level of government. Real-estate interests know they can have their way with weak local officials. South Carolina is one of the few states that doesn't have a state land-use commission, and that's the way the developers like it.

"Since there's no statewide effort, it's easy to pick off these local governments one by one," says Dell Isham, director of the Sierra Club's South Carolina Chapter.

Sprawl is one of the biggest sleeper issues in American politics. As more citizens fume in snarled traffic (their lifestyle choice, according to the pro-growth crowd), a light may go on in their heads that says this didn't have to be. When it does, their anger will turn most likely on Republicans. Nowadays, Republicans who call themselves conservatives oppose all efforts to control sprawl. Some even hail the tide of development as evidence of economic dynamism.

The Rocky Mountain region, a conservative stronghold, shows signs of growing irritation with Republican enemies of land-use planning. John Hereford, a Republican businessman in Colorado, warned that break-neck sprawl could have political consequences for his party.

"Whether they (land-use issues) become a defining element in the current election cycle is unclear," Hereford wrote recently in The Denver Post, "but a growing number of moderate Republicans and independents are clearly frustrated with the way the GOP is perceived and how it allows itself to be perceived on critical issues of open space, clean water and land-use planning,"

In this part of South Carolina, there's still a "real disconnect" between the growing concern over uncontrolled development and the mindset of local politicians, according to Wyche. But he sees their attitudes beginning to change.

Politicians deaf to the sound of the voters' breaking hearts have no idea how sprawl could come back to bite them.

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