Fast Company gives Wal-Mart ideas

To call these twelve, I mean ten steps some kind of break-through for the business community would be melodramatic. The truth about the corporate-culture and business practices of Wal-Mart has been obvious for a while now. In Part One of Hanft's piece for Fast Company there are two unique suggestions:

2. Fire your consultants. ... Now, you've over-corrected in a really scary way, and have gone out and hired a rogue's gallery of spinmeisters who've worked for Reagan, Clinton, Kerry, and Bush. Is that something to be proud of? These are the people who have thrown gasoline on our obscene culture of partisanship and demonization of the "enemy."

3. Leverage your size to help your 1.6 million employees in unexpected ways. The public views you as resisting health insurance benefits because you are cheap and evil. Turn that around. Imagine the radical impact you could have on the marketplace and your brand optics if you focused your ruthless cost-cutting skills on HMOs, forcing them to crumble under the same margin pressure that you so regularly exert on vendors.

Then in Part Two he goes on to mention a few more (and one that I disagree with completely).

7. Stop treating your employees like commodities. No one thinks of Wal-Mart as a place to get a first or a second job, stay on, and build a career. You've got to change that.

10. Lastly, you've announced you're running a big holiday TV campaign, using celebrities for the first time -- names that include Garth Brooks, Queen Latifah, and Destiny's Child. That timing really makes a lot of sense. Kill it. You can't afford health care benefits but you can afford to pay over-priced celebrities to dance around the TV screen? Celebrity advertising has lost its luster anyway, and does anyone really believe that these chauffered millionaires actually shop at Wal-Mart?

I'm glad he (and hopefully a large segment of the American population) has recognized that Wal-Mart is not only a nasty example of how a company can operate but an entirely phony enterprise that can barely hide its disdain for working-class people.

The one problem I find with Hanft's piece is his Sixth suggestion "Expand your vendor base." This would defeat Wal-Mart's key ingredient: aggressiveness and directly impede two other suggestions he made in this piece (one I mentioned above about leveraging against HMOs and another I didn't about preserving small town business by allowing niche market competition) . The retailer's aggressive tactics are perfectly suited to other non-descript giant manufacturing firms. First, Wal-Mart must change its ways, then perhaps small-scale manufacturers would be interested in selling at Wal-Mart. The most critical way Wal-Mart must signal this change is to demonstrate (not with actors) that the wealth that passes through each Wal-Mart clearly benefits the surrounding community and the people who work there.

These are basic demands.The US retail market is currently at a crossroads: the continued reign of Wal-Mart's approach can be accepted as a necessary sacrifice or it can turn toward alternative approaches that reward work and talent; respect existing communities; cooperate with vendors; and ultimately value human life. This is not a choice that the executives at Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, and dozens of other firms will sit down and ponder about. It's one that every "consumer" can act on. Every time a person decides that he or she WILL shop somewhere this alternative approach is used - the board rooms hear it. Call it a Trickle-Up theory: the force of hundreds of thousands of hands carrying merchandise out of smaller, more thoughtful establishments throughout the country might be enough to move the Wal-Mountain.