TedPage: Wal-Mart takes heat

With the showings of "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" this weekend, the blogosphere is all a buzz about Wal-Mart this week. Some interesting posts include the blog entry of Al Norman where he talks about fliers handed out by Wal-Mart at some screenings. And, this one by Stan Fortune where he discusses the fear of Wal-Mart employees to even see the movie. Both are interesting, but I'm not sure that they say anything about Wal-Mart other than they're fearful of the PR disaster that this is leading.

What surprises me as much as anything is that this type of press isn't new for Wal-Mart. Here is a link to the Frontline story on Wal-Mart talking about exporting jobs overseas. You can even watch it online. Wal-Mart's opposition to unions is legendary. I'm not sure why now is important for Wal-Mart except that they want to start getting into larger city markets that are opposing them. Seems like too little too late.

The funny part about the whole thing is that a large part of Wal-Mart's success is due to innovation, not exploitation. Wal-Mart pioneered large scale use of efficient supply chains, popularizing the word. Today every company is thinking about these problems, shortening delivery times, minimizing warehousing. Heck, UPS is even trying to push this technology into smaller and smaller businesses. Wal-Mart has a notably open relationship with it's vendors, giving them sales data near real-time. This allows the vendors to react faster and provide better results for Wal-Mart. They've opened up data that other's held as secret in order to make their pipeline more efficient.

What this has become is a referendum on ruthless efficiency. Wal-Mart has eeked every little piece of fat out of their pipeline, they run very lean. Wall Street just loves this as they are making a "good business". But, in the end, is that what we, as a society, really want? I think the end result is that we want a little fat in our systems, we want to make them more human and less 'perfect'. I don't think we can blame Wal-Mart for making an efficient system, we've defined that as the goal since the industrial revolution. Perhaps we need a different definition, one that takes into account a little more humanity.