How Wal-Mart Can Restore
Its Tarnished Image
by Raymond Yeh
“Is Wal-Mart good for America?”
CNN posed this question to America and announced the results on August 4, 2004. What a surprise to discover that only 19% of respondents said “yes,” while a stunning 81% said “no.” Wal-Mart was once the darling of consumers all over the nation. What happened?
What Went Wrong?
Wal-Mart started out as the champion of small towns, offering low prices, great variety, and long hours in one-horse towns that no other discount retailer wanted. Wal-Mart gave consumers in those towns a cheap and convenient alternative to mom-and-pop shops, but in its single-minded quest for low prices and strong profit, the chain has destroyed the very towns it sought to help. Today, when Wal-Mart moves into town, everyone shudders with dread, knowing that its low prices will sink every local store in the area, destroying the local flavor and rendering the town vanilla bland.
To make things worse, because Wal-Mart has outsourced much of its work to overseas sweat shops to get a price advantage, it has robbed Americans of jobs and tarnished our nation’s image of caring for human rights. Some towns now ban Wal-Mart outright for all those reasons.
At this point, Wal-Mart is an unstoppable juggernaut of retail growth, but it’s no longer the symbol of the common man. It’s become the dreaded playground bully. How can Wal-Mart restore its image and become a better small town citizen?
How Wal-Mart Can Share the Playground
Wal-Mart needs to learn how to “play nice” and share the playground with small businesses. How? By doing the right thing. Lasting business success is the result of doing the right thing and doing things right. Wal-Mart clearly knows how to do things right in terms of being efficient and making a profit, but recently it hasn’t been doing the right thing my quashing all small business competitors.
To do things right, Wal-Mart needs to return to its vision of helping customers. Wal-Mart executives tell their employees to “be agents for the customers”—in other words, help their customers in any way possible. What Wal-Mart needs to realize is that those customers are the very same people it is putting out of business. To help those customers, Wal-Mart needs to help their businesses as well. Here’s how:
- Before Wal-Mart comes to town, they set
up a Small Business Enterprise Clinic. Through the Clinic
Wal-Mart would share its business expertise with local businesses,
teaching them how to target themselves at niche markets centered
around local goods and services that don’t compete with Wal-Mart’s
staple goods. Wal-Mart would also teach those businesses how to
“do things right,” how operate better, faster, and
cheaper.
- Once Wal-Mart moves into town, it
continues to support local enterprises by sponsoring events and
seminars designed to foster local business growth.
Although this level of attention to unique local businesses is foreign to Wal-Mart’s cookie-cutter approach, this approach will restore people’s confidence in Wal-Mart’s mission to help its consumers. In fact, it will catapult Wal-Mart back into the spotlight as a benevolent pioneer in its industry. It will give the retail chain a soul, which it needs for its long term health.
No business can survive for long under the onslaught of negative public opinion. Wal-Mart can easily turn the tide by transforming itself from the bane of small business to the champion of local enterprise. It’s the right thing to do.
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