Wal-Mart like to brag about its extensive oversears factory inspection program.  But Fast Company questions whether the whole thing is just a vast PR effort.

From Fast Company: 

But if you look closely at Wal-Mart's own 44-page report of its performance (issued last June), Wal-Mart's factory inspection program begins to look like an energetic PR effort, more than a serious effort to protect factory workers.

Of the 12,500 inspections in 2004, only 8 percent were surprise inspections. That means 92 percent of Wal-Mart's inspections of factories in Bangladesh and Nicaragua and China were announced in advance -- the Wal-Mart inspectors made an appointment to come see how the factory was run.

Wal-Mart announced that they will now carry Emergency Contraception in their stores, but will allow their pharmacies to refuse to dispense it.  Here's the NY Times story, and here's the LA Times piece.

Research by the Kasier Family Foundation indicates that more widespread availability of Emergency Contraception might reduce abortions by as many as 700,000 each year.

Wal-Mart is in trouble again for violating consumer protection laws.

From Reuters:

Michigan's attorney general said on Wednesday he was taking legal action against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. for not properly marking prices on merchandise in its stores.

Attorney General Mike Cox said the legal action was in the form of a "Notice of Intended Action," which is a necessary step before a company can be sued by the attorney general under the Consumer Protection Act.

Wal-Mart's 4th quarter profits rose 13% last year.

From Bloomberg:

 Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, said fourth-quarter profit rose 13 percent after an aggressive advertising campaign drove sales of electronics, clothing and gift cards during the holidays.

Net income increased to $3.59 billion, or 86 cents a share, from $3.16 billion, or 75 cents, a year earlier. Revenue rose to $90.1 billion from $82.9 billion, Bentonville, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart said today in a statement.

Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton paid $35 million for a single painting, and then convinced Arkansas to grant her a $3 million tax exemption on the purchase.

This from TomDispatch.com:

...as Wal-MartWatch.com points out, that the price of the painting equals what the state of Arkansas spends every two years providing for Wal-Mart's 3,971 employees on public assistance; or that the average Wal-Mart cashier makes $7.92 an hour and, since Wal Mart likes to keep people on less than full-time schedules, works only 29 hours a week for an annual income of $11,948 -- so a Wal-Mart cashier would have to work a little under 3,000 years to earn the price of the painting without taking any salary out for food, housing, or other expenses (and a few hundred more years to pay the taxes, if the state legislature didn't exempt our semi-immortal worker).

This is a forum to keep up with what Wal-Mart is up to.  If they are doing something in your area others should know about, be sure to post about it here.

Here's a link to Fired Up! coverage about Wal-Mart. 

Wal-Mart is trying mightily to find a way to get into the banking business, attempting to ignore the legal and historical separation between the retail business and the banking business.

From the Chicago Tribune:

 Last July, when Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced plans to open an industrial bank in Utah, one might have thought the retail giant had just acquired the combination to the banking industry's safe.

So up in arms is the banking industry that Wal-Mart Bank, as the proposed entity is dubbed, inspired more than 1,500 letters to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

"Typically, we receive one or two letters on a new bank, and many times we receive none," an FDIC spokesman said.

Internal Wal-Mart documents reveal that CEO Lee Scott thinks that employees who expect health care coverage are just whiners.

From the The Independent:

Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, took another blow to its reputation yesterday after its chief executive was quoted telling an employee he should quit rather than complain about the company's famously miserly terms and conditions.

Amid a continuing storm over poverty pay and union-bashing by the mighty retailer, leaked internal web-chats revealed a testy exchange between Lee Scott and a store manager he implied was being disloyal.

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is the target of yet another criminal probe for their methods of disposing hazardous waste.

From the AP:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is the target of a criminal investigation over how it handled merchandise that is classified as hazardous waste, the company announced Tuesday.

The world’s largest retailer said in a regulatory filing that the investigation centers on the company’s transport of hazardous materials from stores in California to a return center in Las Vegas. The company said its practice is to move hazardous materials to return centers, then take the materials to sites approved for hazardous waste disposal.