MORE REASONS TO HATE WAL-MART

Walmart Sucks!!!

NEW YORK - Human error is to blame for an offensive link at Wal-Mart’s Web site that recommended a film about Martin Luther King Jr. to potential buyers of a “Planet of the Apes” DVD, the retail company said Friday.

The mistake resulted from a well-intentioned effort to promote a DVD about the black leader, said Carter Cast, president of walmart.com, the online shopping arm of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. A business manager had grouped “Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream” with three other black-themed movies and assigned the package an overly broad category of DVD boxed sets, Cast said.

So when an online visitor looked at a listing for the boxed DVD set “Planet of the Apes: The Complete TV Series,” the black-themed movies appeared under “similar items.” Cast said the display juxtaposition may have existed for the past year.

Wal-Mart removed the feature from its Web site Thursday after learning of the juxtaposition from reporters. Wal-Mart apologized and shut down indefinitely its entire online system for referring shoppers to other movies. Cast said there was no racist motivation. “There was nobody here who maliciously put together that combination,” Cast said by phone from walmart.com’s headquarters in Brisbane, Calif. “I know the person was well-intended in trying to get the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech out as a cross-sell.”


Walmart.com uses a different system than many other big online vendors to create cross-selling links. Amazon.com, for example, bases recommendations on what a shopper has bought before and what other consumers who buy a certain item also purchased. Walmart.com manually assigns movies to specific “item display groups,” such as science fiction or African-American culture. The company’s internally developed software then generates links guiding shoppers to other movies in that group.

Beside the “Apes” boxed set, the King package could have been linked to any of a random selection of other boxed set titles from a group of more than 260, including “Best Of Hitchcock, Vol. 1 (Collector’s Series).” Cast said walmart.com would only start cross-referencing movies again once it has a new system in place to avoid a repeat. That could be a technology more like what Amazon.com uses or another approach, he said. “We are looking at a bunch of different solutions right now,” Cast said.

Need Another Clue? Walmart STILL sucks!!!

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. -Wal-Mart Stores Inc., under a new barrage of criticism for how it treats its workers, is going on the offensive a week before the launch of a documentary that attacks the retail giant. The company alleges that director Robert Greenwald’s movie “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices” gets basic facts wrong.

The world’s biggest retailer and largest private employer in the United States, with 1.2 million domestic workers, is also touting a rival DVD release, “Why Wal-Mart Works: And Why That Drives Some People C-R-A-Z-Y”.

“I’m a bit surprised at the amount of money that they are spending in attacking me,” Greenwald told The Associated Press in a telephone interview on Thursday. In a media packet sent to news organizations this week, and on its Internet site, Wal-Mart says it has only seen trailers for the Greenwald movie but dismisses it as “a propaganda video”. “We have seen the trailers and some ’bonus’ footage, and it’s already obvious that Mr. Greenwald has a careless disregard for the facts,” Wal-Mart said in a news release.

Greenwald’s movie will have a limited release on Nov. 4 in New York and Los Angeles and then go to a week of screenings across the country organized by Wal-Mart critics including unions. Greenwald, who produced and directed “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” says none of the $1.8 million in private financing for the film came from organized labor.

Organizers expect about 40,000 people at 7,000 DVD screenings in the week starting Nov. 13 in churches, homes, libraries and universities nationally. “The movie Wal-Mart doesn’t want you to see” is what campaign group Wake-Up Wal-Mart calls Greenwald’s film in a national ad campaign that starts next week.


The group funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers is helping promote the movie with a series of print, online and broadcast ads. The film uses interviews with small business owners, ex-Wal-Mart workers and managers, community activists and workers in overseas factories to allege that Wal-Mart’s low-cost, low-price business model is bad for communities, the economy, its employees and their families.

Wal-Mart said that it has no plans to sell DVDs of the positive film on Wal-Mart in its stores, but they can be purchased on www.whywalmartworks.com. DVDs of Greenwald’s movie can be purchased on www.walmartmovie.com.