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Wal-Mart fires back

The retailer picks Tampa Bay as a focal point for a media blitz aimed at critics.

By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published January 13, 2005

TAMPA - Claims that Wal-Mart drags down the nation's pay and benefits do not square with Michael Martin's experience.

"I'm making more after working four years at Wal-Mart than I did after nine years at Winn-Dixie," said the 32-year-old produce department manager. "I left Winn-Dixie because I couldn't get a promotion. Here I got one after six months."

And so went Martin's third media interview Thursday. By mid-afternoon he and a half-dozen fellow volunteers at a Tampa Wal-Mart Supercenter had talked of their experiences to three local newspaper reporters and four television stations while a Wal-Mart spokesman flown in from corporate headquarters listened nearby.

The media event, one of 14 in hand-picked markets nationally, is part of a stepped-up nationwide PR campaign to silence the world's largest retailer's army of critics: retail workers unions, academics, lawyers, preservationists and politicians who have been attacking the discount store giant and much of what it stands for.

Like a sleeping bear that's been kicked awake, Wal-Mart said the company has decided it must be far more aggressive about fighting back.

"For too long, others have had free rein to say things about our company that just are not true," said Lee Scott, president and chief executive officer. "Our associates (Wal-Mart speak for employees) are tired of it and we've decided to draw our own line in the sand."

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. took out full-page ads in 100 newspapers nationally on Thursday including the St. Petersburg Times, Tampa Tribune, Florida Sentinel and Weekly Challenger as well as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

The ads reveal financial information the Bentonville, Ark., retail behemoth, the nation's biggest employer with a domestic work force of 1.2-million, never made public before. The average hourly Wal-Mart worker earns $9.68 an hour nationally. In the Tampa Bay area it's $9.32. The company employs 13,669 people in the five-county region and made $890,000 in charitable contributions.

In 2003, the average full-time hourly wage in retailing was $9.55, according to the National retail Federation.

While Wal-Mart has been criticized for everything from its role as the nation's biggest importer of Chinese goods to lawsuits accusing it of gender discrimination, the company distilled its defensive PR campaign into three talking points:

-- Wal-Mart creates good-paying jobs.

-- It offers competitive benefits including affordable health insurance, profit-sharing, reduced-price stock purchases and 10 percent employee discounts.

-- Its rapid growth creates opportunities for advancement.

Wal-Mart zeroed in on the three jobs issues because surveys identified them as the ones doing the most damage in customers eyes.

"But clearly our associates were telling us they wanted us to start fighting back because so much of what they were reading and seeing in the media was wrong," said Carol Schumacher, Wal-Mart vice president of corporate communications.

In case you missed the ads, Wal-Mart posted them at the checkout counters in all 3,360 U.S. stores. The company also posted all the national market-by-market figures on a new Internet web site walmartfacts.com. The company picked Tampa Bay as a focal point for the campaign because it has been among the discounter's strongest growth markets as it attempts to dominate the grocery business the way it has dominated general merchandise.

In five years Wal-Mart zoomed from nothing to the No. 3 grocer in the Tampa Bay area. Including Sam's Clubs, the company has 36 stores here with plans for 11 more supercenters and one more Sam's Club over the next three years. If the added supercenters meet the company average of about $87 million in annual sales, that would take almost $1-billion in retail sales out of the hides of a variety of other retailers.

The PR campaign "proves that Wal-Mart is nervous that American shoppers are going to realize that those Always Low Prices come at a serious cost," said Gabrielle Coppola, spokeswoman for the AFL-CIO.

Working conditions at Wal-Mart became a more high-profile media story once the company started building supercenters - which are a combination discount store/grocery store - in California, a state where the big supermarket chains are unionized.

The United Commercial and Foodworkers union, which has been trying to organize Wal-Mart workers, has a corporate campaign attacking Wal-Mart for its affect on competitor pay and benefits in union markets. In California, union workers went on strike last year when their employers demanded and got wage and benefit concessions to better compete against Wal-Mart's pricing.

The union staged other negative PR campaigns against Publix Super Markets Inc. when the Lakeland chain challenged union grocers' hold on the Atlanta market in the 1990s and Food Lion Inc. tried to get into the unionized Washington, D.C. market in the 1980s. The union organized three race and gender discrimination suits against Publix and generated news coverage alleging that Food Lion sold tainted food.

In California, Wal-Mart said its average hourly employee earns $10.15 an hour. A recent University of California-Berkley study estimated Wal-Mart workers there earned $9.70 an hour in 2004, which is 31 percent less than the $14.07 average paid those who work for other large retailers. The study also claims families of Wal-Mart workers use 40 percent more in taxpayer-funded health care and 38 percent more in other public assistance programs than the average for other large retailers.

"I'm rather skeptical of the facts Wal-Mart is putting out," said Elizabeth Drea, a spokeswoman for the UCFW Local 881 in Chicago. "They're trying to do a glossy PR campaign to gloss over the reality."

So far most of Wal-Mart's domestic growth has been in rural and suburban areas. But the company faces tougher sledding as it tries to penetrate densely-populated urban centers. The company recently was turned back in attempts to build its first store in Chicago. In New York City, labor leaders and some retailers last week asked the City Council to block the company's plans to open its first store there.

-- Information from Bloomberg News was used in this report.

-- Mark Albright can be reached at albright@sptimes.com or 727 893-8252.

[Last modified January 13, 2005, 19:43:38]