Al Norman

In less than a month, Wal-Mart will celebrate a Golden Anniversary at its annual shareholder's bash at Bud Walton Arena on the campus of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

Last year, entertainers Will Smith and the Black Eyed Peas were brought in to divert the 16,000...

Cathy Kern is somewhat of a folk hero in North Tonawanda, N.Y.

But if you ask folks at city hall, or at Wal-Mart corporate headquarters, what they think of Cathy Kern, you'll get the opposite response. Over the past six years, Kern and other anti-Wal-Mart activists have filed 5...

The cops in one southern city were busy this past week cleaning a group of Occupiers from the front steps of City Hall in the middle of the night.

The city of Athens, Georgia--home to 30,000 University of Georgia students--has long enjoyed a reputation as a unique southern setting....

The term 'retail rustling' describes the efforts of one community to steal the merchants that are doing business in another community. It's a form of business poaching that has been going on for many years, but has gotten so cut-throat in some areas that local officials are attempting to get...

Ten months ago, Sprawl-Busters first reported the death of a Brazilian immigrant worker during a botched renovation job by an unlicensed crew inside a Wal-Mart in Massachusetts.

Romulo de Oliveira Santos died at the age of 47 on the floor of a Wal-Mart vision center in Walpole, Massachusetts....

News that Wal-Mart soon will be removing its "people greeters" from the mouth of every store across America was ironic given how hard it was for Sam Walton to get them there in the first place.

According to Tom Coughlin, Wal-Mart's former COO and Vice Chairman of the...

If there is a teaching moment for economic injustice -- Wal-Mart is it.

This enormous corporation has been built upon the backs of the 99% -- the 1.4 million American workers who have been exploited for 50 years to produce the richest family in the United States: the Walton heirs....

Wal-Mart had its own "oops" moment this week when it had to quickly pull the plug on a widespread news story about its ambitions to create a nation-wide health care program.

A 14 page "confidential" Wal-Mart document was leaked to NPR. The document was a solicitation for...

Wal-Mart has stumbled onto something really big: stores that are really small.

After ripping up our nation's landscape for nearly half a century, Wal-Mart has discovered that you can open up a store 1,000 square feet in size -- and then fold it up and disappear two months...

THUNDER BAY, ONTARIO -- This week, I received an urgent email plea from residents in Thunder Bay, Ontario concerned about the logo saturation of their community by Wal-Mart and Target.

"As you may be aware," the Thunder Bay residents wrote, "Canada's Hudson's Bay Company sold the leases to some...

New York Study Says Retailer Will Kill 14,000 Jobs

By Al Norman

Unlike the top secret Manhattan Project in the 1940s, which produced the first atomic bomb, Wal-Mart has made no attempt to hide its ambition to carpet bomb all five boroughs of New York City with its stores....

In less than 11 months, Wal-Mart will turn fifty.

No longer a company in its adolescent growth spurt, the giant retailer is showing its advancing age. In fiscal year 2011, Wal-Mart's U.S. store count grew by only 49 units, or 1.3%. In 2010 by only 52 stores,...

In just over 14 weeks, a new museum of American Art will open in a small town tucked away in the Arkansas Ozarks. It is being financed and built with profits made by the Wal-Mart corporation, and stocked with artwork collected by the second richest woman in the...

Two days into the summer of 2011, a group called the National Summer Learning Association issued 10 press releases across the nation, heralding the award of $11.5 million from the Wal-Mart Foundation -- one of the largest ever made to a single group -- to create summer learning...

For the past 20 years, Wal-Mart has fed its stores with agricultural produce from a company called Martori Farms. According to Hoover's profile of the company, Martori is "a fruit and vegetable grower, packer, shipper, and wholesaler and is the largest commercial agricultural company in Arizona.

The agra...

CHICAGO -- Like some modern-day Moses, Chicago's new Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been wandering in the "food desert" of southside Chicago, looking for giant chain stores to feed his people.

But just as Moses never reached Canaan, Mayor Emanuel may never emerge from the food desert if he keeps...

On May 16, 2011 California Governor Jerry Brown released a revised state budget to address what he called the state's "Wall of Debt."

One of the Governor's more controversial proposals was to reform California's Enterprise Zones (EZs) program, which was created in 1986 to stimulate economic activity...

Terry Nelson, all is forgiven.

The Republican operative who was fired by Wal-Mart five years ago for his role in a race-baiting ad, has now been welcomed back to the fold in Bentonville.

Nelson, a native of Iowa, who began his political life in the Hawkeye...

South Africa has been warned.

A global coalition of organized labor converged this week on Pretoria, South Africa -- where a government office known as the Competition Tribunal is considering a mega-acquisition of MassMart by Wal-Mart that will reboot the retail landscape of an entire continent. MassMart owns roughly 290...

Giant retailers like Wal-Mart and Target are using mom and pop stores as human shields in their battle against Amazon.com over taxing online sales. The powerful real estate investment trusts that build bricks-and-mortar malls, along with the big box stores they rent or sell to, now want you to pay...