Media Watch Week of April 28th
The Sunday New York Times story The Brain — Our Food Traffic Controller should not be missed In a story that should be getting wider circulation, author Hannah Wallace details how to feed a family of three all-organic foods on a food-stamp budget, published in all places Bon Apetit Blog. Take a look at Wallace’ […]
Big Retailers Exploit More Workers With On-Call Schedules, Adding Margins That The Manufacturer Bill Backs Alone Can’t Achieve
For years its been well known to anyone in the grocery business that one way a lot of supermarkets deal with the ongoing challenge of “making their weekly numbers” has been to cut hours, especially for the highest wage earners and give those low-paid clerks more hours. What we didn’t know is that supermarkets are […]
Wal-Mart’s Corporate Sustainability Consultancy?
A story at GreenBiz.com recently caught our attention. Turns out that there’s an interesting side business for the Walmart, that epitomizes much of the problems with American market capitalism When Wal-Mart isn’t getting vendors to pare prices down to the bone or leveraging new locations to maximize business from rural Americans with too few places […]
LOHAS Wal-Mart and Whole Foods
Interesting piece on the sustainable motivations that link Whole Foods and Wal-Mart. We think everyone knows who is more sincere about changing the planet but its not bad if Sam Walton’s folks want to save money and look good too. http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/jun/20/unlikely-pair-talk-green-whole-foods-wal-mart/
This Just In From Pork Magazine—Hormel Offers Natural Line Of Meats
Well the world really is changing when the folks who make SPAM and a whole world of processed pork, beef and poultry ‘partakings’ have announced a new line of all-natural sandwich meats and ham products. As reported in the above mentioned magazine, PORK (ah don’t you love trade publication)Hormel’s Natural Choice line is low fat, […]
Wal-Mart to the World: We Want to be the #1 Organic Retailer
Wal-Mart’s recent announcement that it plans on rapidly expanding its selection of organic items in its stores garnered plenty of attention. Yet NBN believes that while Wal-Mart is seriously considering the opportunities here, we aren’t holding our breath. Of course we know that there will be more and more organic milk, peanut butter and dry […]
Wal-Mart’s New Campaign Makes Us Queasy
New ‘Humanitarian’ Strategy Revealed As noted in the March 2nd New York Times, Wal-Mart’s new marketing strategy, that includes selling premium items across all segments isn’t about capturing more and more retail sales it’s a humanitarian effort. The low price message is now history. In its stead Wal-Mart’s new campaign is to convince America that […]
Anyone Want to Buy A Bridge–And How About Wal-Mart Going Green
Supermarket News reported yesterday that Wal-Mart is incorporating experimental green design elements in a new superstore that it is building in McKinney, Texas. While the company failed to provide further Supermarket New with further details, the story reports that Wal-Mart states that it “will incorporate experiments from 21 companies involving new equipment and technology on […]
Slate Magazine Looks at Whole Foods
Article Points Out Image Isn’t Everything and Then Gets It All Wrong In one the better pieces on Whole Foods Market, Slate looks at Whole Foods phenomena and asks the question is WFM really all that wholesome? While we wondered whether the story would be just another snaky complaint about high prices and fancy gourmet […]
Wal-Mart Canada Makes Us Blush—Retailer Begins Selling Sex Toys
While this has very little to do with our normal range of stories, well, we just couldn’t resist passing this on. According to a story in Canada’s newspaper, The Globe & Mail, Wal-Mart Canada will begin selling sex toys, or what the retailer euphemistically refers to as ‘sexually well being products’. As noted in the […]