By DAVID RYAN,
Napa Valley Register

By MICHAEL BARBARO
New York Times
October 31, 2007                         [back to top]    

In what is shaping up to be the earliest holiday shopping season ever, Wal-Mart Stores says it will offer door-buster discounts this Friday, three weeks before they are traditionally unveiled on the day after Thanksgiving.

The giant discount chain is expected to announce a plan today to sell five major products — like a $350 laptop — beginning at 8 a.m. on Friday in a bold effort to jump-start holiday shopping two days after Halloween.

The move is likely to put growing pressure on Wal-Mart’s competitors, like Best Buy and Toys “R” Us, to begin marking down merchandise well ahead of Nov. 23, known as Black Friday because it was historically the day stores turned a profit, or went into the black.

The pre-Thanksgiving price-cutting underscores how worried the retail industry is about consumer spending this season. With the housing market in a slump and energy prices high, industry analysts expect retail sales in November and December to grow at the slowest rate in five years.

In the phenomenon of “creeping Christmas,” stores like CompUSA and Gap have begun opening their doors at midnight on Thanksgiving to drum up business, delighting some bargainhunting consumers and irritating some others who bemoan the earlier-than-ever start to the season.

But no retailer has ever tried to single-handedly move Black Friday, considered the biggest shopping day of the year.

Linda Blakley, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said that consumers “are feeling all kinds of pressure, but because part of our DNA is to provide great prices on the gifts people buy, we are starting to do that early.”

Four of the five products will remain secret until Thursday morning, when they can be found — but not bought — on the walmart.com Web site. Shoppers can begin buying them in stores at 8 a.m. on Friday, where the company expects the kind of long, early-morning lines that are common on Black Friday.

By keeping the products secret until the last minute, Wal-Mart will avoid the risk of newspaper circulars leaking out onto the Internet weeks before the sale, as Black Friday ads now regularly do, much to retailers’ chagrin.

Ms. Blakley said Wal-Mart would still offer Black Friday deals on Nov. 23. “This,” she said, “is an early Christmas gift to our customers.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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UPDATE 1-Wal-Mart starting big holiday deals this week

Reuters
Wed Oct 31, 2007                             [back to top]  

NEW YORK, Oct 31 - Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Wednesday it will begin offering this week the type of holiday discounts it typically reserves for "Black Friday" -- the day after Thanksgiving that typically marks the start of the ultra-competitive holiday shopping season.

The world's largest retailer said that on Thursday it will list special deals on its Web site, like an Acer Aspire laptop with a 14-inch LCD screen for $348.

Customers will then be able to buy the products in its stores starting on Friday.

Wal-Mart has said it intends to be aggressive this holiday season to boost sales at its U.S. stores.

It is trying to reassert itself as a low-price retailer and appeal to shoppers who are being squeezed by high energy and food costs, the unstable real estate market and a credit crunch. Last year the company downplayed its discount roots in an effort to attract more business from higher-income shoppers.

Wal-Mart began reducing prices on popular toys in September, and earlier this month said it cut prices on 15,000 items, 20 percent more than at the same point a year before.

At its analyst meeting last week, Wal-Mart said it was doing "very, very well" selling Halloween merchandise and candy, and was confident in its Christmas plans.

"When it comes to Christmas, you're going to see (a very different look) from Wal-Mart because you're going to see an increased effort behind presentation," Eduardo Castro-Wright, head of its U.S. operations, said at the meeting.

The retailer is opening Christmas shops in its stores that will sell holiday decor and gifts, and offer product demonstrations. (Reporting by Nicole Maestri)

© Reuters 2006. All rights reserved.

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No to another Wal-Mart in Ceres

By LIONEL BARRAGAN,
The Modesto Bee
October 30th, 2007                             [back to top]  

I work in Ceres and I would like to respond to "Ceres certainly needs more retail, but not more Wal-Marts" (Oct. 17, Page B-7). For me, Wal-Mart isn't the holy grail of shopping. Wal-Mart almost sells all of what Ceres businesses had to offer before Wal-Mart came to town. Ceres certainly doesn't need more of the same.

Especially distasteful to me is the notion of Wal-Mart's new slogan "Save money, live better." Is saving money the key to happiness? And who is living better — really? Certainly not Wal-Mart employees.

The perception of the "live better" slogan lies in grave contrast to the daily reports about how the Wal-Mart corporation abuses its authority and excuses itself from responsibility. As Americans, we never found it beneficial to allow corporations or any city to suppress its people.

I applaud all Wal-mart employees, vendors, and business partners, worldwide who have been courageous coming forward with their stories. Their accounts of Wal-Mart's lack of concern for people and the environment, interfere with my support of the corporation. Nevertheless, I believe that many fine people shop and work at Wal-mart.

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David versus Goliath: Austin residents take-on Wal-Mart

By Justin Finney
OpEdNews
October 30, 2007                    [back to top]  

In November 2006, residents in Austin, Texas who lived near a dying shopping mall called Northcross received some big news in their morning paper: Wal-Mart was coming to town—literally. This wasn’t going to be your typical super-center situated off of an interstate, but a 219,000 sq. ft. Wal-Mart (the largest in Austin) near a four-way intersection flanked by neighborhoods. The biggest surprise to residents though was that the site-plan had already been approved by city-council. Concerned about the impact of a large 24 hr. Wal-Mart in their backyard, and frustrated that their input hadn’t been sought, the residents formed RG4N (Responsible Growth for Northcross) and the fight was on.

Early on in the fight, RG4N discovered that Wal-Mart had fine-tuned its site application process from lessons it’d learned during previous battles against other cities—over 280 cities have stopped Wal-Mart, according to the San Luis Obispo New Times. In most cases, Wal-Mart purchases land that its stores will occupy; this time it would only lease. Usually, residents get wind of a new super-center because Wal-Mart “is purchasing property or has got to change zoning,” said Lisa Waddell, vice-president of RG4N. “We think that they were really sneaky here. They really kept it under wraps.”

As a mere tenant, Wal-Mart escaped the direct line of fire, leaving RG4N to deal with the city and the Dallas based developer Lincoln Properties. Residents’ frustration over Wal-Mart’s hushed move-in was compounded by the city’s atypical approval process of Wal-Mart’s site plan. By granting the developer an “administrative” site permit instead of a “conditional use” permit—which RG4N says is required by city law because of Wal-Mart’s outdoor garden center—the city-council wasn’t required to hold a public hearing. Undeterred, residents showed up in large numbers to voice their concerns in front of city council. In response, the city-council claimed “because it’s not an official public hearing, its hands were tied,” said Waddell.

In a surprising development during conversations between city-council and RG4N, some council members revealed that they’d be warned by city attorneys that they’d be financially responsible for their own defense should any lawsuits ensue from interference with Wal-Mart’s site plan—a claim that RG4N’s attorneys say has no legal precedence. In addition to this revelation, it was also revealed in the Austin Chronicle that the city manager, Toby Futrell, had a husband who worked for Wal-Mart as a HVAC service manager. Shortly after the conflict of interest was revealed, the city manager recused herself from future dealings in the matter, but only after the site-plan was a virtual done-deal.

Determined to fight on in light of these depressing revelations, RG4N took up a number of tactics: from drawing up a vertical mixed-use site plan with civil engineers as an alternative to a Wal-Mart, weekly protests at the mall’s street intersection (one protest brought out over 3500 people who formed a human chain around the mall,) reaching out to the developer Lincoln Properties, and the eventual lawsuit filed after Lincoln’s second site-plan application was submitted.

The second site-plan, offered ostensibly as a compromise from Wal-Mart, called for an extra turn-lane, the reduction of the building in size from 219,000 sq. ft. to 192,000 sq. ft. (made possible by narrowing the aisles,) and a store opened for 22 hours a day instead of 24—except on holidays.

If Wal-Mart thought its compromise offer had been generous, RG4N made it clear they thought otherwise with the filing of a lawsuit against the city and Lincoln Properties in June 2007. If successful, the lawsuit will invalidate the site-plan. In its lawsuit, RG4N alleges that the city broke four laws in granting the site permit by using the wrong approval process, failing to enforce a plat note that limits runoff (which would negatively impact a nearby creek,) failure to enforce a protective tree ordinance, and failing to enforce traffic and public-safety provisions.

RG4N’s own projections on traffic impact indicated a discrepancy between what the developer presented to the city and the city’s own traffic research. “The big numbers aggregate from our estimates and the city’s study of the other super-centers is 25,000 cars a day. Lincoln’s estimate was 15,000 cars,” said Waddell. In addition to these numbers, the city had already rated the nearby intersection at near capacity. “The city rates streets on a scale from A to E, with E being the point of failure and requiring some kind of mitigation to the street because of its impact to public safety,” said Waddell. “The intersection on Burnet and Anderson (intersection near development) is already at a D minus with current traffic.” Such traffic, besides causing pollution and turning once quiet neighborhood streets into mini thoroughfares, also slows down emergency vehicles and endangers the many residents who run, walk, and bike in the area.

Regarding the runoff from the Wal-Mart, another allegation in the lawsuit and important concern of residents, Waddell said that the nearby creek couldn’t handle the extra inflow. “Shoal creek is a watershed area and a designated flood zone.” In addition to the runoff’s flood hazard, there’s the usual pollutants of oil and fertilizers resultant from the thousands of cars and outdoor garden-center that will negatively impact the environment. “Runoff from cement parking lots is different. If it’s not absorbing into the ground than it’s in streams and puddles. It’s running down into rivers and overflows.”

But residents' concerns over a Wal-Mart super-center moving into their neighborhood aren’t confined to the allegations listed in the lawsuit. Literature on the group’s website cites a litany of reasons why Wal-Mart isn’t healthy for communities: a national study of over 500 Wal-Marts reported a 400-1000 higher percentage rate of police incidents compared to the nearest Target super-centers, another report on three Iowa communities showed property values are lowered when local businesses go under, and then there’s the noise and light pollution that’s inevitable with a super center—some of the homes in one Austin neighborhood are only 600 feet from the proposed Wal-Mart.

In a show of support for RG4N, a number of local businesses have stepped forward and donated money, in addition to donations received from sympathetic Austin residents. However, in spite of all the public resistance, Lincoln Properties has boldly moved ahead and started partial demolition on the mall, accepting the risk of losing in court, and in turn, it’s own construction profits.

In one immediate victory though, RG4N has convinced the developer to halt the decimation of 26 mature trees on the site. This small victory in the uphill battle against the world’s largest private employer and sales chart-topper of the Fortune 500 was a partial anodyne to the irony of Austin’s recent passage of the “big-box ordinance,” shortly after the city’s approval of the Wal-Mart site plan. Passage of the ordinance requires stores over 100,000 sq. ft. to be processed with “conditional use” permits. The same kind of permit RG4N says should have been used and would have allowed a public hearing. In addition, a city ordinance creating incentive for “vertical-mixed-use” developments, a type of building design that offers an alternative to big-box super-centers, was also passed too late to have any effect on the outcome of the Wal-Mart in RG4N’s neighborhood.

The final decision that will secure or scuttle a victory for RG4N residents lies in the hands of a judge who will hear arguments on the case on November 13. Should the residents be successful in nullifying the site-plan, Lincoln Properties will have to go back to the drawing board and be subject to all the new requirements mandated by the big-box ordinance. It’s an outcome Lisa Waddell is hopeful for, pointing out that other Wal-Marts that have already begun construction were forced to be demolished after a judge’s order. But she tempers her hope with the sobering reality of the situation. “City-council authorized the city to pay them 250,000 dollars to fight this case,” she said. “The city hired an attorney to fight the citizens…but what else can we do but fight?”

Anyone interested in helping RG4N in its fight against Wal-Mart can visit their website and contribute donations: www.rg4n.org

Authors Bio: Justin Finney is a writer and activist living in Austin Texas. When not mulling over the serious political and ecological conumdrums of the day, he practices French, jogs, and meditates—but not nearly often enough.

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Wal-Mart toy recall lacked some consumer information

Associated Press
October 30th, 2007                       [back to top]  

The federal consumer product watchdog agency said Tuesday that a unilateral recall of lead-tainted toy animals by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. lacked some information that consumers need, including how many toys were sold, when they were sold and at what other retailers.

U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission spokeswoman Julie Vallese said the agency prefers that companies work with it to produce comprehensive recall announcements that give consumers all the information they need to react.

The largest U.S. toy seller announced Oct. 19 that it was pulling sets of plastic toy animals made in China and offering a refund to shoppers. It said its own safety testing, stepped up after this year's string of toy recalls, found excessive lead levels in the material the toys are made of.

Wal-Mart said Tuesday it always works with the CPSC and did so in this case by notifying the agency of the test results and decision to pull the product.

"Our testing revealed excessive levels of lead in these toy sets. We informed the supplier and the CPSC and we felt we had to let our customers know what we'd found," company spokeswoman Linda Blakely said.

Wal-Mart's Oct. 19 recall announcement did not say how many of the sets were sold, when they had been stocked in Wal-Mart stores or name the manufacturer.

The retailer has declined to provide those details when asked by The Associated Press. A spokeswoman said she believed the toys were sold by other retailers but declined to provide their names.

The CPSC's Vallese said she was not criticizing Wal-Mart and said the agency has a good working relationship with the retailer.

But the agency wants recall announcement to contain all the information consumers need to respond, including how many of a product were sold, when and where.

"All of this information is necessary for consumers to respond to announced recalls," Vallese said.

"We are not big fans of when companies handle recall announcements independently of the agency. It can cause confusion and doesn't always provide consumers with the information they need," Vallese said.

The CPSC's recall notices also specify whether a product poses an imminent health hazard, like choking, or because it violates a law, such as those against excessive lead levels.

"Wal-Mart took an action independent of the agency, knowing that we prefer when the announcement (of a recall) includes all the information that makes it more comprehensive and less confusing," Vallese said.

She said Wal-Mart's information prompted the agency to open an investigation of the toys, which were sold in bagged sets of farm animals, jungle animals and dinosaurs without a brand name.

The investigation includes testing by the agency's own labs. Vallese could not say when those results would be done but added that "to say a matter of months would be too long".

While the investigation is active, Vallese said the agency is barred by law from disclosing details including the number of toys sold or at which retailers.

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Wal-Mart announces opening of 36 stores in October

M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD
10/30/2007                                  [back to top]  

Oct 30, 2007 (M2 EQUITYBITES via COMTEX News Network) -- Wal-Mart Stores Inc (NYSE: WMT), the operator of Wal-Mart Stores, Supercenters, Neighborhood Markets, and Sam's Club, announced on Monday (29 October) that the company will complete the opening of 36 new stores and clubs across the US during the month of October 2007. The new stores will reportedly be providing jobs for 10,800 associates. Over 4,300 associates have been hired to fill new positions at new, expanded and relocated stores. The company said that it is opening stores in 22 states in October 2007 that will serve diverse communities from cities to rural and suburban communities. The final two October stores will open on 30 October 2007, including a new Supercenter in Wasilla, Alaska. Since February Wal-Mart has reportedly opened 205 stores and clubs across the US, including 163 supercenters, 19 Sam's Clubs, 16 Neighborhood Markets and 7 discount stores. 32,000 associates were hired to fill new positions, Wal-Mart said.

(C)2007 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

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Market Selling Expired Wal-Mart Food In Beijing

China Retail News
October 30, 2007                   [back to top]  

According to Sina.com, a supermarket in Xiba Village of Beijing's Chaoyang District is selling expired food with Wal-Mart tags.

A staff representative from the Chinese market says in the report that it has been selling expired food, including yogurt, meat and vegetables, for more than two years. Since the price is cheaper than at Wal-Mart, it has reportedly done good business.

Chinese media reports that the expired food that the supermarket sells come from Wal-Mart Zhichun Road Store, but Huang Li, a representative from Wal-Mart's public relations department in China, says that Wal-Mart's store at Zhichun Road has signed with and consigned a company called Beijing Chunqiu Storage and Transportation Company to destroy its expired food. Therefore they say they have never hear of their expired goods being sold by other supermarkets.

Huang says that as a global company, Wal-Mart has attached great importance to the disposal of its expired food and they have never allowed their expired food to flow into other markets. Huang says if it proves to be the cooperating company that has given the goods to the illegal supermarket, they will severely punish the company, and they will set up a special team to investigate

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Wal-Mart opposes Movie Gallery auction

The Associated Press
October 29, 2007                                    [back to top]  

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has joined a group of landlords protesting Movie Gallery Inc.'s plan to close more than 500 of its stores during its Chapter 11 bankruptcy case.

In papers filed Saturday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Richmond, Va., Wal-Mart joined landlords requesting that the court rescind its approval of rules governing the auction of leases on most of the 520 stores that Movie Gallery intends to shut down.

The major discount retailer leases space to Movie Gallery in several locations, including stores in Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida and California. Most of the leased space is located inside Wal-Mart stores.

Wal-Mart has signed on to the objection of the Inland Real Estate Group of Companies Inc., which states that the rules governing the lease auction "are deficient and not reasonable" and that landlords were not given sufficient time to object to the rules before the court gave its approval.

In court documents, Inland said the bankruptcy court's quick approval of the auction procedures "without any prior, meaningful notice to Inland or to the other landlords" threatens to deny the landlords' due-process rights.

As for the auction rules, Inland said they were deficient because they effectively give landlords only five days to evaluate their prospective new tenants. Inland has asked for seven business days.

Last week, two groups of landlords, including Inland, filed objections to how Movie Gallery plans to conduct going-out-of-business sales at the stores.

At issue is Movie Gallery's ability to conduct business during whatever hours it deems appropriate, the lack of a deadline for the completion of the sales and the display of going-out-of-business signs. They fear the disruption of other businesses at the shopping centers in which Movie Gallery rents space.

Movie Gallery, based in Dothan, Ala., filed for Chapter 11 protection on Oct. 16, listing $1.4 billion in liabilities and $892 million in assets. The company aims to save about $70 million in rent by closing the stores.

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New Wal-Mart Larger Than Life

By Kevin Cowherd,
Baltimore Sun
October 29th, 2007                                  [back to top]  

Let's face it: We like big things in this country.

We like big cars, big houses, big burgers we can stuff in our big mouths and Big Gulps to wash 'em down.

We like big TVs, big malls and big sales. Who gets excited about a regular sale anymore? Now it has to be "THE BIGGEST LABOR DAY SALE EVER! DON'T MISS THIS SPECTACULAR EVENT!"

Sometimes, even big won't do. Sometimes we need bigger than big.

Super-sized, that's what we need. Like a pizza the size of a manhole cover, with 27 toppings and 10 pounds of cheese injected via cooking syringe into the crust, the biggest, thickest, gooiest pizza in the whole world.

Anyway, if you're into all this bigness, you need to drive up to Cockeysville and see the new Wal-Mart Supercenter, which is the size of, I don't know, Montana.

Oh, this baby is huge.

It's a gleaming 240,000- square-foot temple of rampant consumerism, aisle after aisle after aisle crammed with every conceivable product you could ever want, all of it shimmering under dazzling white lighting.

It has a Subway restaurant, a bank, a place to get your nails done and a 200-bed surgical center where you can have your gall bladder removed or a torn meniscus repaired between trips to the bakery and photo center.

The store is so big, I had to take a shuttle bus to get from electronics to pet supplies.

OK, that's not true.

Neither is that stuff about the surgical center.

But the store does have a drive-through lane in the garden center, where apparently you'll be able to shop for garden supplies without getting out of your car.

(Because God forbid you actually burn any calories before doing your yard work. I bet they hand out free doughnuts at the garden center drive-through, too.)

Anyway, the new Wal-Mart is absolutely cavernous, if you like that sort of thing. And apparently many people do.

On the day I visited, first-time shoppers seemed dazzled as they pushed around their carts. I saw quite a few of them whip out cell phones and intone to the other person: "Oh ... my ... God. You gotta see this place!"

Well, I did see the place.

In fact, I walked from one end to the other on the faux-marble flooring until my fat feet hurt.

I marveled at the 200 - or whatever the number was - LCD TVs on display, at the health and beauty section that is bigger than most public libraries, at the hot-chicken counter where you could stuff yourself with fried chicken, barbecued chicken, Szechuan chicken, rotisserie chicken, sweet-and-sour chicken and thermonuclear hot wings that looked as if they would melt off your lips.

I took in the immense sporting goods section and all the clothing aisles, and the lamp aisles, and then I stopped to roll a few frames at the 150-lane bowling alley and do some bungee jumping off the atrium skywalk.

OK, I kid about the bowling and bungee jumping, too.

But as I walked and marveled and pounded all that shoe leather, I was struck by this thought: When does big become too big?

When does a huge store become so sprawling, with so many products - food and automotive, books and boomboxes, furniture and bedding, and 27 aisles of pet supplies - that it becomes overwhelming?

What if you don't want to go on a quarter-mile hike to find a jar of pickles, as I did the other day?

What if you don't want to walk up and down 10 aisles looking for a pack of athletic socks?

Yet the fact is that in a few years, Wal-Mart will probably decide that a Supercenter isn't big enough for all its customers.

Then they'll open a Megacenter, 110 acres with a lake stocked with bass in the middle of the store, waterfalls cascading around the pharmacy and vision center, a food court and the aisles crammed with 18 million products for sale.

But after a few years, that'll start to feel small, too.

So then you'll be hearing about the grand opening of the new Wal-Mart Enormocenter, shaped around 246 environmentally sensitive wooded acres, with an overhead monorail system to take you from one end of the complex to the other, a 400-room Marriott on the premises, a 12-screen multiplex cinema, 2,000 checkout counters and every single product ever manufactured on the shelves.

I hope I can find the pickles.

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Wal-Mart rolls out SAP in 14 countries

Rebecca Thomson
ComputerWeekly.com
29 Oct 2007                                     [back to top]  

Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, is to replace its in-house accounting systems with SAP's enterprise resource planning Financials package in 7,100 stores in 14 countries. The first phase is due to finish in 2010.

A Wal-Mart spokesman said the retailer, which is engaged in a £3bn international expansion programme, will replace in-house accounting systems that are "too unwieldy for the global, complex world the company is moving into".

He said, "The timing is right because there are limits to what we can do in 14 countries with the legacy systems. The SAP system is a superior tool for the future."

The accounting package will have to work with existing systems in Wal-Mart, such as logistics and store management.

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Meredith signs licensing deal with Wal-Mart

By Lauren Bell
October 26th, 2007                          [back to top]  

Meredith Corp. has signed a multiyear licensing agreement with Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Products sold at Wal-Mart under the agreement will be based on Meredith flagship magazine Better Homes and Gardens. The exclusive line of home goods will be in Wal-Mart stores by fall 2008.

“We believe Wal-Mart is an ideal partner for the Better Homes and Gardens brand,” said Art Slusark, VP of corporate communications and government relations for Meredith. “ Independent consumer research revealed that Better Homes and Gardens