The Bully of Bentonville

by Anthony Bianco

  The growing ethical and religious backlash against Bentonville is an ecumenical phenomenon, encompassing not only Catholic orders like the Jesuits and the Sisters of Mercy, both of which pride themselves on a commitment to social justice, but mainline and liberal Protestant denominations, as well. As Christianity Today noted in a 2005 article entitled “Deliver Us From Wal*Mart?” the company “has become a lightning rod nationwide in local tempests of moral outrage. Church leaders…have joined grassroots activists fearful that mindless global market factors will steamroll human dignity.” 7

  About 1,000 churches across the country screened Robert Greenwald’s documentary film exposé Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices during its premiere week in November 2005. The most avid of the film’s supporters was the United Church of Christ, which had been searching for a way to signal its opposition to Wal-Mart’s labor practices short of calling for a boycott, as it had done earlier against Taco Bell in support of tomato pickers in Florida. “A boycott is not workable because Wal-Mart is the only place to shop and [many consumers] now have few other options,” said Edith Rasell, the UCC’s minister of labor relations and community economic development. However, she added, “The time has come for the UCC to very visibly support the right of [Wal-Mart] workers to organize for a higher standard of pay and benefits.” 8

  The anti–Wal-Mart gospel is preached with special verve by pastors of inner-city African American congregations. When Wal-Mart began pushing for approval to build two Supercenters in Chicago in 2004, nine black churches jointly urged a boycott of the company’s stores in outlying areas of the city. Among them was the Trinity United Church of Christ, a South Side congregation of 8,500 that promotes itself as “unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian” and whose stained-glass windows depict Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists. Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Trinity United’s pastor, excoriated not only Wal-Mart but also its supporters within the black community. “Whenever price means more to you than principle,” thundered Wright, “you have defined yourself as a prostitute.” 9

  The case made against Wal-Mart from the pulpit of black churches is essentially political, not theological, though inevitably it comes with plenty of quotes from scripture. Wright and like-minded ministers argue that Wal-Mart does not serve the cause of black economic empowerment on balance because it underpays and bullies its employees, especially its non-white ones. (As of mid-2005, Wal-Mart employed 208,000 blacks and 139,000 Hispanics, jointly accounting for 34 percent of its U.S. workers.) Jesse Jackson, whose Rainbow/PUSH Coalition is based in Chicago, likes to use the metaphor of Kool-Aid and cyanide. “The Kool-Aid is the cheap prices,” Jackson says. “The cyanide is the cheap wages; the cyanide is the cheap health benefits.” 10

  Jackson also is a man of the cloth, and at a press conference in Inglewood, California, he responded to a pointed theological question—“Did not God create Wal-Mart, too?”—with an outburst of biblical reference. “God created Pharaoh, but he empowered Moses to get emancipated. God created Herod, but he empowered Jesus to get resurrected after Herod’s forces killed him,” Jackson said. “Surely, in free will, we are all God’s children. Some of God’s children are not fair. God created Adam, Eve, and Cain. But Cain killed Abel because he was greedy. Wal-Mart represents Cain. They are greedy.” 11

  Faith-based opposition to Wal-Mart was voiced first not from the pulpit but from within the genteel, big-money realm of professional investing. Over the last two decades, many religious denominations, like many secular investors, have made a concerted effort to align their investment holdings with their values and beliefs. On Wall Street, a new subindustry of money managers and funds emerged to try to meet the growing demand for “socially responsible” investments that also are lucrative. Religious institutions sought to add to their financial clout by joining together to form the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), which now represents 275 Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish groups with $110 billion in investment assets.

  The most tenacious of all of Wal-Mart’s critics is an earnest, plainspoken nun from New Jersey named Sister Barbara Aires, the director of corporate responsibility for the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth. Aires, who also sits on the ICCR’s board, has been meeting regularly with senior Wal-Mart executives since 1990 to press them on issues ranging from racial and gender discrimination in the United States to the use of child and prison labor in its suppliers’ overseas factories. “How does Wal-Mart sustain its low prices? What is it paying its workers? What are the benefits? What is the impact of their business on a lot of other, small businesses?” Aires demanded in 1999. “The company has been growing by leaps and bounds, but it needs to look at these issues.” 12 The proliferating public controversies of the Scott era have made Aires’ crusade a less lonely one, judging by the clerical collars and crosses in evidence in the crowd that thronged Bud Walton Arena in Fayetteville for Wal-Mart’s 2005 annual meeting.

  Wal-Mart management is much more respectful of religious investors than of the average secular site-fighter. In 2004, Scott spent an entire day at the Interfaith Center’s offices in New York in meetings with such devoted critics as the Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastic, the Congregation of the Passion, the Mennonite Foundation, and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. While Wal-Mart has offered up many a conciliatory word, it hasn’t actually done much of anything to placate its religious critics on the left. “It’s nice to talk, but it’s time for action to substantiate that they actually are making progress on the many issues of concern to us,” said Vidette Bullock Mixon of the pension fund arm of the United Methodist Church. 13

  The principal weapon faith-based investors wield against Wal-Mart is the shareholder resolution. Scores of such resolutions are voted down at every big American corporation’s annual meeting; in Wal-Mart’s case, the announcement of their defeat customarily prompts derisive hooting and hollering from the majority of stockholders who have come mainly to cheer on their company. However, the nuns keep returning to Fayetteville every year and are gaining ground. In 2004, the ICCR crafted a new omnibus complaint, moving that Wal-Mart be required to “develop a public sustainability report on efforts to protect human rights, worker rights, land and the environment.” The resolution won 14.2 percent of the vote in 2004 and 16.2 percent in 2005. Another resolution demanding a detailed report on workforce diversity garnered 18.8 percent approval.

  These percentages are a more telling measure of shareholder discontent than they might seem, considering that the Walton family always votes its 40 percent holding against all shareholder resolutions. “Progress is slow, but it’s still progress,” said Sister Esther Champagne, co-president of an association of twenty-seven religious groups in Québec that enlisted in the fight against Wal-Mart after it closed the store in Jonquière. 14

  Meanwhile, a growing number of social-responsibility funds have dumped their Wal-Mart shares in protest against the company’s intransigence. In 2001, Wal-Mart was removed from the Domini 400 Social Equity Index, which consists of 400 big companies screened for worthiness by KLD Research & Analytics of Boston. Wal-Mart had been the third-largest company in the Domini 400, which KLD introduced in 1990. KLD gave Wal-Mart the boot for buying merchandise from sweatshops in Asia and from suppliers in Myanmar, a country under the control of a military junta notorious for human rights abuses. “Other companies that have been similarly exposed to sweatshop and Myanmar controversies, including the Gap, Liz Claiborne, Nike, Timberland, and Reebok, have taken steps to improve their records on these issues,” said KLD in explaining its decision to pull Wal-Mart. “In contrast, Wal-Mart’s progress has been minimal.” 15

  Religious investors rarely intervene in site fights, even when one of their own comes under attack by Wal-Mart. In Guelph, the Jesuits had secular allies aplenty but neither asked for nor received outside support from their Brothers or Sisters in Christ. In a general sense, though, many religious denominations have added Bentonville’s bu
llying of local communities to their roster of complaints about Wal-Mart. In mid-2005, a group of investors led by Domini Social Investments and the Christian Brothers Investment Services, whose $4 billion portfolio makes it one of the largest Catholic investors, issued a set of guidelines designed to pressure big-box retailers into doing a better job of “environmental and social due diligence” in locating new stores.

  The guidelines came with a forty-two-page report filled with instances of Bentonville’s bad behavior in its relentless drive to expand. For example, in Dunkirk, Maryland, Wal-Mart circumvented a limit on store size in 2004 by building two stores side by side. Together, the stores exceeded the cap limit by 30 percent. In Honolulu, the company infuriated many native Hawaiians by opening a store before the ancient human remains, or iwi kapuna, extracted from the building site had been reburied. A similar outcry occurred near Nashville, Tennessee, when 800-year-old Indian graves were moved to make way for a Wal-Mart and a Lowe’s store. However, Wal-Mart did back away from other plans to build on Ferry Farm, the childhood home of George Washington, where, in legend anyway, our first president chopped down a cherry tree and could not lie about it. 16 Simultaneously taking on the ghost of George Washington and the very live and persistent Sister Barbara Aires was too much even for Wal-Mart.

  The outpouring of criticism from elements of America’s religious establishment has to be galling to the executives of a company deeply imbued with a sense of its own Christian virtue. “I’m not saying that Wal-Mart is a Christian company, but I can unequivocally say that Sam founded the company on the Judeo-Christian principles found in the Bible,” former Wal-Mart Vice Chairman Don Soderquist wrote in his 2005 book, The Wal*Mart Way. 17

  Sam Walton was an evangelical sort of mogul who artfully spun the fervent Christian fundamentalism of the Ozarks into a distinctive corporate ethos linking personal salvation to Wal-Mart’s entirely secular, commercial success. “Wal-Mart publications are full of stories of hard-pressed associates, once down on their luck, who find redemption, economic and spiritual, through dedication to the company,” observed Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and editor of Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism. Managers are expected to help associates fulfill their mission by providing “servant leadership”—a phrase of subtle Christian connotation that has appeared with increasing frequency in Wal-Mart literature, most notably in Sam’s Associate Handbook in 1991. 18 When Scott was promoted to CEO, one of his senior colleagues praised him as “a true servant leader who knows how to build a team and get them to work together.” 19

  The upsurge in faith-based attacks on Wal-Mart confounds and angers many born-again Christians, not only in Bentonville but throughout the country. According to Christianity Today, they tend to look upon “Wal-Mart as a family-friendly place and a company founded on the biblical values of respect, service and sacrifice.” 20 To many theologians of a conservative bent, the whole social justice crusade betrays an unwarranted (and unacknowledged) hostility to capitalism itself. “The making of a profit, to many of them, appears to be axiomatically immoral,” contended Father Robert Sirico, a Catholic priest who is president of the Acton Institution for the Study of Religion and Liberty. Sirico argued that “the act of responsibly making profits is itself a social investment. I doubt that a lot of the folks in this movement believe that.” 21

  For its part, Wal-Mart is not overtly Christian in its marketing or its public relations. “You will never hear us talking about taking a moral stand on something or taking an ethical stand on something,” insisted Jay Allen, Wal-Mart’s senior spokesman. “What we represent are the Wal-Mart customers.” 22 In other words, Wal-Mart wants to define itself solely by what it sells. What we are is what you buy. Aspiring to the status of a value-neutral selling machine makes good business sense. Mass merchandising is hardly the Lord’s work, so why should Wal-Mart risk offending potential customers by defining itself as what they are not? Management’s steadfast refusal to own up to its abhorrence of labor unions—“We’re not anti-union, we’re pro-associate”—is intended in part to keep union members as customers even as Wal-Mart goes to great lengths to keep unions themselves firmly at bay.

  However, Allen’s protestations of neutrality are disingenuous. The fact is, a corporation defines itself at least as much by its actions as by its words. To a greater degree than any of its competitors, Wal-Mart has indeed taken a moral stand in its merchandising decisions. Through its actions, if rarely its words, Bentonville chose sides in America’s culture wars, adopting the same conservative default position that won George W. Bush two terms in the White House: Placate the religious right and take your chances with everybody else.

  Wal-Mart was the only one of the ten largest drug chains to refuse to stock Preven when Gynetics Inc. introduced the morning-after contraceptive in 1999. Although Preven works only in women who are not pregnant, Pharmacists for Life and some other anti-abortion groups considered Preven an abortion pill. They pressed Wal-Mart to ban it. According to Allen, Wal-Mart’s decision not to carry the drug was based solely on its poor sales outlook. “If anybody of any belief reads any moral decision [into] that, that’s not right,” Allen said. 23 However, Roderick L. Mackenzie, Gynetics’ founder, says that senior Wal-Mart executives said privately that they did not want their pharmacists to have to grapple with the moral dilemma of abortion. Mackenzie was incensed, but tried to mask his anger in the futile hope that the company would reverse its decision and stock Preven. “When you speak to God in Bentonville,” he said sarcastically, “you speak in hushed tones.” 24

  Wal-Mart’s sanitizing of its media offerings is one of the most unusual—and controversial—aspects of a sales pitch calculated to curry the favor of the socially and religiously conservative. To be sure, selectivity is built into Wal-Mart’s business model in the sense that it carries far fewer product offerings than Barnes & Noble, HMV, Blockbuster, and other chains that specialize in media and entertainment. In addition to excluding stuff that does not measure up to the standard of a potential blockbuster, Wal-Mart makes a point of shunning fare that might offend the “family-values” police. A. William Merrill of the Southern Baptist Convention praised Bentonville for its message to Hollywood and the publishing industry: “They have said, ‘Don’t send us smut.’” 25

  Wal-Mart will not sell any CD with a parental warning sticker, thus excluding most rap and hip-hop releases from its shelves. It does sell some R-rated DVDs and Mature-rated video games, but screens them for content and demands proof that buyers are at least seventeen years old. Because books and magazines do not come with third-party ratings, the printed word poses the biggest challenge to Wal-Mart’s buyers. Like countless jurists, they struggle to define indecency but are expected to know it when they see it. “There’s a lot of subjectivity,” conceded Gary Severson, a general merchandise manager who oversees books, as well as toys, electronics, and sporting goods. “There’s a line between provocative and pornographic. I don’t know exactly where it is.” 26

  Comedian George Carlin chose When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? as the title of his bestselling 2004 book to “piss off ” all three major religions. He succeeded. Wal-Mart didn’t care for the title or the jacket illustration that removed Jesus from Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous painting of the Last Supper and inserted Carlin next to the Redeemer’s empty chair. Wal-Mart sent back 3,500 copies of Carlin’s book that had been shipped to the store either inadvertently or as a provocation.

  The cover of Jon Stewart’s America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction was tailor-made for Wal-Mart, with its bald eagle and huge American flag backdrop. “We thought the flag on the cover would do it for Wal-Mart since they’re fond of selling things with flags on them,” said Ben Karlin, co-author of America and producer of Stewart’s The Daily Show. 27 But some enterprising Wal-Mart buyer paged through the parody civics textbook and found a portrait of the Supreme Court in which the heads of the
justices had been Photo-shopped onto naked bodies. As a result, Wal-Mart banned the book, making itself an even riper target of ridicule on The Daily Show and its spin-off, The Colbert Report.

  Lucky for him, Jon Stewart did not need Wal-Mart to sell a million copies of his book. However, most authors and musicians must win a place on Wal-Mart’s shelves in order to make the bestseller lists. Wal-Mart’s combination of massive size and selectivity has made it a multimedia house of hits nonpareil. By some estimates, it accounts for 60 percent of the total sales of America’s top-selling DVDs, 50 percent of top-selling CDs, and 40 percent of top-selling books. “They pile up best-sellers like toothpaste,” scoffed Stephen Riggio, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, the largest U.S. book chain, which carries 60,000 titles to Wal-Mart’s 500. 28

  Many music labels produce edited versions of albums for sale at Wal-Mart by deleting swearwords or by rerecording a tune with new lyrics. CD covers, too, are frequently altered to Wal-Mart’s tastes. Even the late Kurt Cobain, the famously contrary front man of the rock band Nirvana, caved when the retailer objected to paintings of fetuses on the cover of the In Utero album. “He remembered growing up in Aberdeen [Washington] and knowing that Wal-Mart was one of the few places you could go to buy music,” recalled Danny Goldberg, Nirvana’s former manager. 29 Nirvana also changed the title of the In Utero track “Rape Me” to “Waif Me.”

  Wal-Mart banned Sheryl Crow’s eponymous 1996 album for lyrics that only the company would have found offensive, as contained in the song “Love Is a Good Thing”: “Watch out sister / Watch out brother / Watch out children as they kill each other / With a gun they bought at the Wal-Mart discount stores.”