The Wal-Mart Movie: Viewer Beware

Since today is Wal-Mart day at the Huffington Post, I might as well put in my two cents. I have just finished writing an article for National Review about Robert Greenwald's new movie (the article is not yet available online), and what I found bewildering about the picture was Greenwald's decision to open it with a segment that is flat-out factually inaccurate.

The movie tells the story of H&H Hardware in Middlefield, Ohio. It's a good business, run by good people, but a Wal-Mart is coming to town, and H&H is forced out of business. The segment is elegiac, with sad and frustrated comments from Don Hunter, the man who founded H&H in 1962, and Hunter's son Jon, to whom he turned over the business in 1996.

But it turns out the story did not happen as Greenwald presents it. H&H closed three months before the Wal-Mart opened its doors, and Don Hunter told me that the decision to shut down H&H had nothing to do with Wal-Mart. "Really, there was no connection," he told me. "I've seen a lot of small local entities wiped out because of Wal-Mart, it happens all over, but that was not the case here." In addition, businesspeople in Middlefield told me that H&H had been a troubled enterprise for several years, hit by the economic downturn of a few years ago and plagued by poor management decisions. Jon Hunter's decision to close surprised no one.

In addition, another man featured in the Greenwald picture, an optical shop owner named John Bruening, who runs a store near the old H&H, told me he got the impression that the filmmakers had their story in mind long before they came to Middlefield. "I told them, 'You're probably hoping that you can get a shot of all these people in [my] store and then come back eight months later and we're out of business,'" Bruening told me. But things didn't happen that way. "The Wal-Mart came May 18, and I sat back and waited for our business to go down the tubes," Bruening said, "but it shot up, which the movie people didn't want to hear about. We're up about 38 percent right now. It has been so anti-climactic."

When these issues were raised, the moviemakers tried to argue that Wal-Mart might not have directly killed H&H but nevertheless played a role in the store's demise because the coming of Wal-Mart devalued the H&H property and made it impossible for Jon Hunter to get a much-needed loan. But it appears that property records do not support even that contention. And just to add one more bit of evidence that Wal-Mart was not to blame, the H&H property has been sold to new owners, who have opened it as...a hardware store.

Now it should be said that Don Hunter and John Bruening are no fans of Wal-Mart and are quite critical of some of its business practices. And it is undeniable that the arrival of a Wal-Mart store has sometimes meant the end for small businesses around the country. And finally, there are clearly some issues -- like the number of Wal-Mart employees on public aid in states across the country -- for which company management should be held to account. But why did Robert Greenwald begin a high-profile indictment of Wal-Mart with an argument that just doesn't hold up?