Walmart on The Huffington Post

Wal-Mart Jobs Expose: Why A Recent NYT Story About Working At Wal-Mart Was A 'Stunt': Laura Heller

2009-12-23T11:30:25Z

Getting a peek inside a major retailer can yield some pretty revealing information about their business and culture. It's not an easy thing to arrange -- there are hoops to jump through, media relations representatives to juggle and a vetting process. But in the end, a reporter can walk away with a pretty great story.

If only that were true of a recent New York Times article, "My Initiation at Store 5476."

Katie Bethell: Peaceful Revolution: Shop Wal-Mart, Get...Sick?

2009-12-17T17:08:21Z

If you shop at Wal-Mart to finish up that last bit of holiday shopping this week, you may be coming home with more than a good deal -- you might be exposed to contagious illnesses like colds and the flu.

Why? As the New York Times recently reported, employees can receive "occurrences," commonly known as demerits, lose pay, and ultimately risk termination for taking sick days.

That's exactly what happened to this family: "My husband just got fired for missing sick days. He missed 5 1/2 days in 6 months." This member of MomsRising.org, a grassroots organization working on family economic security issues, reports that these were days when her husband had legitimate doctor's notes or when her husband's manager sent him home because of flu symptoms. He received "demerits" when he took this needed sick time, and "The day after Black Friday... they called him in and fired him for missing too many days in 6 months. He did not take off 'weekends, sunny days, or go fishing'...he was sick. This is just wrong."

Wal-Mart's practice is not just unhealthy and unfair for employees, it also could harm customers and the general public. With about 1.4 million employees in the U.S., that's a lot of people who could be coming to work sick, and unwittingly exposing their coworkers and customers to contagious diseases such as the flu -- putting us all at risk.

Wal-Mart isn't the only company with unhealthy and unfair sick days practices (even during the H1N1 emergency). In fact, this flu season more than 59 million employees in the U.S. have no paid sick leave. Even more -- nearly 86 million -- do not have paid sick leave to care for sick children. That's bad for employees, and it's bad for public health. When sick people go to work, they may bring their contagion with them and into the public.

That's why MomsRising.org, in partnership with the National Labor Committee and dozens of other organizations, has launched its Demerit Walmart campaign. We're building a movement of thousands and thousands of people who are standing up to Wal-Mart until the company changes its short-sighted practices. It's Wal-Mart and its executives who need a demerit badge, not its workers.

Give Wal-Mart a demerit badge today -- in the height of the shopping season -- and tell them to stop punishing employees for taking sick days. www.demeritwalmart.com

Together, we can help millions of families stay healthy and keep needed jobs.

A Peaceful Revolution is a blog about innovative ideas to strengthen America's families through public policies, business practices, and cultural change. Done in collaboration with MomsRising.org, read a new post here each week.

Walmart's Latest Quest: Dominating Internet Shopping

2009-12-17T16:33:31Z

With a week to go before Christmas, division CEO Raul Vazquez says Walmart.com's holiday sales are growing two or three times faster than Web sales overall.

Mayor Daley Urges Aldermen To Support Second Walmart

2009-12-16T17:28:23Z

Mayor Richard Daley tried today to exert new pressure on a logjam that has kept City Council from approving plans to add a second Wal-Mart store in the city.

Wendy Diamond: The Gifts that Keep on Giving

2009-12-10T15:45:52Z

Have you ever thought about what color llama you would get someone for Christmas? Everyone, except maybe Scrooge agrees that the holidays are all about giving and helping others in need. A recent Animalfair.com readership study found that 84% of pet parents will give their furry pals gifts this holiday season, with 61% of those giving said they are giving the gift of puppy love - more love, hugs, kisses, and play time!. In return, our pets give us the most important gift that we can't buy: puppy love! Here are a few different ways you can give gifts that make a difference!

1. As the holidays approach, don't have a cow . . . give a cow! Heifer International, a charity that is focused on caring for the earth and ending hunger and poverty, has many farm animals available as gifts. For a donation, an animal is given to families in need all over the world. For example, you can make a donation and a goat or cow will be given to a family to supply milk. Thanks to your generosity, lucky families can "moo-ve" up in life! Visit heifer.org for more details.

2. Every year, animal lovers adopt dogs and cats, but have you ever thought about adopting a gorilla? Now, before your head explodes, be aware that you can adopt a gorilla without giving up your guest room to him. Through the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, you can give a donation and an endangered gorilla will be cared for in your name. For more information on how you can have your very own Donkey Kong, visit www.gorillafund.org.

3. This holiday season, give the gift of protection for the little guys! Now, we're not telling you to become a bodyguard or join the Secret Service, but you can help out endangered animals that can't defend themselves. Leonardo DiCaprio has the International Fund for Animal Welfare on his Christmas list. IFAW gives you the opportunity to protect some sweet seals or cuddly cubs in exchange for cute gifts like a calendar or stuffed animal . To find out how you can help, go to www.ifaw.org.

4. Now, making a difference and saving a pet's life is as easy and fun as a shopping spree! Bring Pets Home (bringpetshome.org) is working with a whopping 140 retail stores, including Walmart, Zales and Macy's, to help the millions of shelter pets find loving homes for the holidays. All you have to do is purchase those perfect red shoes or that new blender you wanted and portions of the purchases are automatically donated to shelters all over the nation!

5. Anyone who has a kid, or has been a kid for that matter, knows how much young people want to get their paws on video games. This "howliday," get that special gamer in your family the new "Petz" video game for the Nintendo DS. This new game from Ubisoft teaches children how to be responsible pet parents as they raise their very own digital dog or cat. Ubisoft is teaming up with the ASPCA to use this opportunity to raise awareness and educate young people on caring for a pet.

For more information, visit animalfair.com.

William Petrocelli: The Publishers Run into Sharp Elbows

2009-12-07T14:50:11Z

This is Part Two of a multi-part series on publishing. Part One of this article can be found at No one warned the Dinosaurs. Will Anyone Warn the Publishers?

The major publishers have gone from being the dominant players in the book business to a point where they can now be buffeted around by Walmart, Target, Costco, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and other mass merchandisers. The wounds they have suffered are largely self-inflicted, but that doesn't ease the pain. Publishing weakness is bad news for writers, readers, and everyone else.

Publishers are the only major players in the book business that have a tradition of developing and promoting a broad range of literature and new authors. Without strong publishers, the book business could quickly degenerate into a type of anarchy -- a cacophony of voices in which the highly-ideological, the celebrity-driven, or the wealthy would be the only ones heard.

Instability in book publishing worries many people. But you have to wonder what a collapse of a major book publisher would look like. The biggest U.S. publishers are subsidiaries of much larger, international media conglomerates: i.e. Viacom (U.S.), Bertelsmann (Germany), Pearson (UK), Hachette (France), and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (Australia). None of these mega-corporations is likely to buckle under setbacks in the U.S. book publishing business, because their interests are far too diversified.

The threat is more subtle than a publisher shut-down. If publishing becomes unprofitable, you are more likely to see one or more of these companies simply downgrade their publishing component, lay people off, re-allocate resources, and -- in short -- do all of the things that very large companies do when they want to stop putting money into an unprofitable business component without saying much about it. Given that publishing has become hidden within the portfolio of some very large businesses, any shrinking of that business might happen in small bites - a slow, non-dramatic degrading of the publishing tradition until there is very little left of it.

U.S. publishing was once very entrepreneurial, and as late as forty years ago it was still dominated by family-owned firms. There were no large mass-merchandisers imposing their will on publishers during that period. The problems now besetting major publishers largely began at the time they were being absorbed into larger, multi-media companies. Is there a cause and effect relationship between these two things?

One-to-one correlations are always a bit simplistic, but there can be little doubt that the loss of entrepreneurial discipline within the publishers has had a damaging effect. The major publishers are much less inclined than they were in the past to nurture a new author's career over a series of books, and they are often unwilling to keep an author's books in print for any significant period of time. Publishers in the last few decades have even engaged in the shameful practice of pre-screening certain books with their big-box and chain store customers -- giving them, in effect, a veto power over what the rest of us get to read.

If you are close enough to the publishing business, you get the sense that book-lovers within the major publishers are constantly fighting the bean-counters -- and losing all the significant battles. The big publishers seem only to be looking at their quarterly profits, searching for familiar formulas they can follow or fads that they can grab onto ("Vampires are hot! Do we have a vampire book? Let's get a vampire book!"). At the same time many of these mega-companies are giving bloated advances to certain political or media personalities in situations that might have more to do with the company's other agendas rather than the quality of those books. Despite the good effort by some dedicated people at the publishing level, the biggest publishers seem to have lost their sense of mission as well as their sense of confidence.

But it has been the response of the major publishers to demands by the big-box retailers for deeper discounts that they've been the most shortsighted. By giving in to such demands, they enabled the big box retailers to gain control of the business and -- as is apparent now -- achieve enough power to impose their will on the publishers.

The Robinson-Patman Act, part of the U.S. anti-trust laws, requires that a manufacturer avoid favoritism by selling to competing retailers at the same price. This law, adopted in the 1930s, was designed to prevent chain stores from squeezing independent stores out of business. But despite the law, the major publishers in the 1970s began giving secret, lower prices to the two dominant chains of the period: B. Dalton (now Barnes & Noble) and Waldenbooks (now Borders). Those two chains were, at first, content to use the extra money to improve their competitive position by doing such things as obtaining favorable locations in shopping malls.

Then Crown Books with its president Robert Haft entered the picture (Remember him with the squeaky voice? "If you paid full price, you didn't buy it at Crown Books!"). He demanded and got the same secret, lower pricing that the other chains were enjoying. But Haft did something different with the extra money: he weaponized it. Crown began a highly-publicized marketing campaign of discounting best-selling books. It wasn't long before the other two chains -- newly energized with Wall Street money -- began doing the same thing. By the late 1980s the practice of discounting bestsellers -- linked at the time to the N.Y. Times bestseller list -- became the norm within the book business.

The independent bookstores sued to stop the secret pricing deals that were fueling these discount wars and that were threatening to run them out of business. (I have to confess here that I was intimately involved in those legal actions). Despite an occasional success, however, the favored pricing and the discount wars continued without interruption.

There was one question that the major publishers could never answer: Why did they do it? Why would you give favored treatment to one set of retailers who were using that price difference to drive another set of retailers out of business? The answer was usually a mumbled statement about the chains "expanding the business." But that made no sense. During the 1990s the chain store expansion virtually doubled the amount of bookselling space in America, but there was no significant increase in book business sales as a result of that expansion. Unit sales of books hardly kept pace with the growth in population. The only tangible result of that expansion was the closure of many independent stores while the growth of the chains marched on. There was no market expansion - retail sales simply shifted into the hands of a few big-box retailers who were by then in a position to impose their will on the publishers.

It didn't stop there. Amazon.com appeared on the scene in the 90's and began its own demands for favored treatment. But there were still bigger hands stretched out, others who were looking for -- and receiving -- favors. The mass merchandisers -- Walmart, Target, and the others - demanded and got from the publishers the lowest prices of all based on the fiction that they were somehow wholesalers and not retailers.

Now the publishers are faced with a problem. Many familiar independent booksellers are gone, and they've been replaced by big-box retailers with far sharper elbows. At the moment, they -- not the publishers -- appear to be controlling the book business.

What can publishers do to regain their footing?

This is part two of a multi-part series.
Next time: What's next for publishing?

Black Friday Shoppers Run Wild In Wal-Mart (VIDEO)

2009-12-02T09:16:46Z

Unlike 2008, when a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death in Valley Stream, New York, there have been no reported deaths this year associated with Black Friday, the most popular shopping day of the year. Nevertheless, Black Friday 2009 was not a subdued affair.

One video posted on YouTube shows the extent of shopping madness induced by sale prices and media hype. It shows shoppers, releasing piercing screams at an undisclosed Wal-Mart while furiously clawing their way into the store and down the aisles, leaving some shoppers injured on the ground.

Watch the video below.

William Petrocelli: No One Warned the Dinosaurs. Will Anyone Warn the Publishers?

2009-12-01T10:04:22Z

When the dinosaurs were in the midst of their demise, did they have any idea they were facing extinction? If they knew, could they have changed course?

There are many people inside the major publishing houses -- those, at least, who have survived the industry lay-offs of the last few years -- who may be wondering the same thing. The best-seller price war that is being waged by the mass merchandisers is the latest symptom of a problem that has been growing larger and larger. The major publishers are in a difficult position: they are service companies that function like manufacturing companies -- 20th century businesses in a 21st century economy. The control of the book business is gradually slipping out of their hands.

Thirty years ago, publishers dominated the book business. Thousands of retailers carried their books, but even the biggest among them -- the regional chain stores and the department stores -- were not large enough to impose their will on the publishers. Publishers -- mostly family-owned businesses -- could do what it took to develop new authors and promote a full line of books.

All of that has changed. Walmart, Target, Costco, and other mass merchandisers now control about 30% of the book market; Barnes & Noble and Borders have another 30%; Amazon.com claims another 15%. The publishers have long since lost the upper hand in dealing with this group. The mass merchandisers return books to publishers at a rate of 40% or more, and the rate of returns from the chains is often considerably higher. The demands of each of these players for sweet-heart price terms and additional promotional money are incessant. Barnes & Noble, and probably soon Amazon.com, has begun publishing its own titles to compete with many of the publishers' offerings. One of the chains, Borders, has been flirting with insolvency for the past couple of years and threatens to leave the publishers with a mountain of unpaid bills (the book business equivalent of a company that's "too big to fail"). Publishers find themselves in the intolerable position of having to give in to the demands of the strongest of the mass merchandisers while absorbing the losses of the weakest.

Peter Olson, former CEO of Random House publishing, gave this bleak assessment of U.S. publishing in a January 2009 article in Publishers Weekly. Publishers, he said, are faced with the agony of becoming "bankers without the prospect of a bailout."

Initial orders for new titles will be cut further, shelf lives of slow-moving titles will be shortened and return rates probably will spike to unprecedented levels in the first half of 2009. Bookstore chains will attempt to make publishers share their pain by demanding more favorable discounts, additional payments for front-of-store placements and significantly longer payment terms. With cash flow concerns paramount, the existing tension between retailers and publishers will escalate.

Nothing that has occurred since then has done anything to prove Olson wrong.

The major publishers are now forced to deal with these other large players on their terms. In a world of shrinking sales and ballooning costs, they've grabbed on to what appears to be a life raft - the celebrity best-seller. These are the books, the major publishers hope, that will generate big enough sales at the mass merchandise outlets to offset all of their losses elsewhere. But this is a strategy that spells trouble for the rest of the book business. Once again, in the words of former Random House CEO Peter Olson:

Publishers will likely continue to overbid for potential bestsellers, justifying their offers on marginal contribution from outdated sales projection models. This means bad news for other writers, as the willingness of publishers to invest time and money in developing new projects and of retailers to risk stockpiling unknown authors may drop precipitously.

And could it be that this strategy will backfire against the publishers themselves.

The mass merchandisers are now in a price war in which they are selling these bestsellers below cost in order to bring in customers for their other, higher-priced merchandise. This is a classic loss-leader strategy. The big merchandisers have decided that it's worth losing a few dollars on each book in order to get the traffic. But what if that changes? What if these same retail giants decide they like selling these books at $8.00 a copy but they don't like losing $4.00 or $5.00 on each sale? Inevitably, they'll try to squeeze more concessions out of the major publishers. But if that's not enough, then what?

In the mind of many publishing executives there's probably this nightmare scenario: the publishers might be cut out altogether. In this bad dream the buyer at Walmart sits down with the celebrity-author's agent and asks this question: "What if we give your guy his normal royalty rate on each copy of the next book, and then we print it and sell it ourselves? Who needs the publishers anyway?"

Who does need the publishers? The answer: just about everyone else.

As an independent bookseller, I find the weakened condition of the major publishers alarming. And this weakness is bad news for writers and readers as well.

This is part one of a two-part article.
Part two: What can publishers do to get out of this mess?

Economist Predicts Just 2% Growth In 2010

2009-11-28T19:04:18Z

A Robust economic recovery in 2010 is certainly on most investors' wish lists as this year draws to a close. A return to prosperity would not only mean an end to our long financial nightmare, but it would also buttress a rebounding stock market, one of 2009's few bright spots.
S
The news out of Dubai late last week, however -- that its investment company is struggling to meet repayments on some of its $59 billion in debt -- reminds us that we are far from finished with a ferocious deleveraging process...

Scuffling Customers Close S. California Wal-Mart

2009-11-27T15:20:52Z

UPLAND, Calif. — Police say a Wal-Mart store in Southern California closed its doors for several hours before dawn after some Black Friday shoppers began fighting over bargain merchandise.

Lt. Jim Etchason says officers in Upland, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, were called to the store at about 2:44 a.m. and helped herd customers into the parking lot.

Borders, Barnes & Noble Experience Major Losses

2009-11-25T15:46:41Z

Things aren't looking good for big booksellers Borders and Barnes & Noble. The AP reports that both chains have posted major losses for this quarter, their sales made worse by the online price wars between Amazon and Walmart that have driven prices on new bestsellers down so much as to make it nearly impossible for bookstores to compete.

Barnes & Noble hopes for some degree of profit in the future from its new eReader, the Nook, a new competitor for Amazon's Kindle. In launching into the digital book market is at least a step ahead of Borders, as analyst Michael Norris points out.

Stocks for the two companies have also fallen significantly. The Wall Street Journal reports a major fall for Barnes & Noble despite the early success of the Nook, which is currently unavailable until January.

Borders UK seems to be doing even worse than its American sibling. BBC News reports that Borders UK has been looking for a buyer recently, unsure if there will be enough cash to get through the Christmas season. The Guardian also notes that recent visitors to the Borders UK website have been unable to place orders, and that the chain has started to cancel author signings.

The future is looking bleak for these bookselling chains.

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Black Friday Deals 2009: The BEST Offers From Major Retailers (PHOTOS)

2009-11-23T11:15:14Z

Black Friday deals are coming early in 2009.

Partially due to the desperation of struggling retailers, the holiday shopping season kicked off a bit early this year, with a number of stores announcing major sales before the Black Friday discount frenzy that falls on November 27.

Major retailers, including Toys "R" Us, Walmart, Kmart and Sears are holding pre-Black Friday deals and promotions on their websites, so with the big day fast approaching, it may be time to start thinking about your shopping strategy for the holidays.

Here is a breakdown of what a few major retailers are offering. To do some research on your own, browse any number of the Black Friday specialty websites here, here and here.

Bloomberg reports that Kohl's will allow customers to start making Black Friday shopping lists at Kohls.com starting November 22. Keep an eye out for other retailers to follow suit. Toys "R" Us will open at midnight on the 27th, five hours earlier than in years past, The Baltimore Sun reports, and other retailers will open in the wee hours.

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Woman Who Cut In Line At Walmart Could Face Prison Time In Racially Charged Incident

2009-11-16T09:53:46Z

ST. LOUIS — Nearly three years after Heather Ellis switched checkout lines at a southeast Missouri store and touched off what she calls a racially charged dispute with white customers and authorities, the young black schoolteacher faces a trial that could send her to prison for 15 years.

Witnesses have told authorities Ellis cut in front of waiting customers at the Walmart in Kennett on Jan. 6, 2007, shoved merchandise already placed on a conveyor belt out of the way, and became belligerent when confronted, according to court filings.

Retail Sales Up 1.4 Percent In October On Big Boost From Auto Sales

2009-11-16T09:09:18Z

WASHINGTON — Improved retail sales gave Wall Street a boost Monday but provided little hope for a robust holiday shopping season that might invigorate the economic recovery.

The October figures, driven by a surge in auto sales, exceeded economists' expectations. Yet consumers are so squeezed by tight credit and rising unemployment that economists don't expect to see significant spending until well after year's end. Even optimists predict scant improvement over last year's holiday season.

Rich Buying Again, But Middle Class Still Hurting

2009-11-13T16:58:15Z

American shoppers are splitting again: The affluent are finally starting to buy, picking up designer clothes at places like Nordstrom, while those on the lower economic rungs are still scrimping by, heading to Walmart for the basics.

Recent earnings reports from major retailers suggest that the wealthy, who pulled back their spending the hardest during the financial meltdown last fall, are once again being enticed to open their wallets and going back to higher-end outlets.

Simon Sinek: The Best Thing You Can Have Is Bad Intelligence

2009-11-12T09:12:17Z

During the Cold War, America would fly spy planes over the Soviet
Union to count how many bombers they had. Knowing exactly what the
Americans were doing, the Soviets laid out hundreds of fake, wooden
bombers to trick the Americans into thinking that they had a much
bigger capability than they actually did. The problem was, America
believed its own intelligence and built real bombers to counter the perceived Soviet threat.

It
wasn't until after the fall of the Berlin Wall did we learn that, if we
ever had gone to war with the Soviet Union, we would have annihilated
them because our resources vastly outnumbered theirs. This massive
unfair advantage would not have happened if it weren't for the good
fortune of some bad intelligence.

Believing that your
competition is stronger and better than you pushes you to better
yourselves. Whether real or perceived, believing you have a
disadvantage forces you to find new and clever ways to compete. It's
always the organizations that are resource constrained that come up
with the good ideas to win.

You can save money on competitive
analyses by simply pretending that whatever your competition is doing,
they are doing it better than you. This works whether you're the
leader or the challenger. Instead of constantly trying to compare what
you're doing to others, focus instead on constantly trying to improve
yourself and the way you do things. You should believe, true or not,
that there is always someone lurking on the horizon waiting to take
advantage of you.

The greatest threat any organization can face
is not its competition but its own success. With great success comes
complacency - the false belief that you are the best and that you don't
have to worry. The problem is, you'll only realize it's a false belief
when someone else catches you by surprise. This pattern is repeated
over and over and over. Wal-Mart, Microsoft and General Motors all
believed that they were unbeatable -- until a company who believed they
were not as strong found a better way to compete with the 800lb gorilla.

Are you a leader who wants to know more about how to inspire people?

Click to read a chapter of Simon Sinek's new book: Start With Why

Simon Sinek

Author

Start With Why

Read Now - http://bit.ly/L26zk

Twitter - @simonsinek

Reproductive Justice: Conservative Catholic College Rejects Birth Control

2009-11-11T20:45:58Z

Despite the fact that Belmont Abbey College argued in court that it was a secular institution in order to receive state funds, it recently removed birth control from its employee health care plan. Their reason? The Catholic Church is opposed to contraception. In that case, why does Belmont Abbey College lease land to a Walmart that sells Plan B (aka "the morning after pill")?

Employees of the college are afraid they'll lose their jobs if they protest the sudden change in health care policy. Yet eight professors appealed to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with a claim of discrimination. And the federal commission agreed that the college had discriminated against women. Now the Catholic school claims it will close its doors before returning birth control to the health care plan. The college is using the controversy as evidence of a liberal conspiracy to restrict religious freedom in America.

One of the eight professors who protested the removal of birth control from the health care plan shares his experience below.

Video report from Belmont NC, by Hunter Stuart and STV Productions

I am one of the faculty members of Belmont Abbey College who filed a charge with Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against my employer for removing coverage of birth control from our employee health care plan. I do not see this as a religious issue but rather one of gender discrimination. The college prescription plan covers the health problems that men have, such as prostate trouble and, to be fair, it should also cover those unique to women, among them birth control pills. That is required by the civil rights act which requires that we treat all races, genders, religions, etc. in the same manner. That is what we are trying to promote. We are not in conflict with the anti-abortion movement: good contraception means fewer abortions.

A small minority of Catholics, (by all polls less than 10 %), have a problem with contraception.

The college advertised itself as an equal opportunity employer and freely accepted funding that was not available to religious institutions. In fact, the college actually went to the federal court of appeals arguing that it was not religious in order to obtain state funding. You can read the case yourself in any law library or lawyer's office at 429 F. Supp 871. Does a truly religious institution deny that it is religious to obtain money?

The appropriate committees formed ideas regarding how the benefits could be restored without offending Catholic sensibilities but found that the administration would not discuss the matter with them. In the exact words of the college president: "consultation was not an option." The college's position was basically that they would not ever change their mind but you could come at any time so they could tell you why you were wrong.

Nobody questions the right of the college to promote its religious beliefs, only its practices which affect others. The law makes a distinction between religious beliefs which are absolutely protected and religious practices which are often regulated when they affect others, as the college's practice does here. The regulation of practices is necessary: there are people who believe in human sacrifice or ritual child abuse.

Forcing us to abide by a Catholic approved health plan makes no more sense than prohibiting a Catholic plumber from eating a pork sandwich for lunch if he works at a Jewish hospital. It would be an ugly world if an employer is allowed to impose religious practices on employees who do not share the employer's views. A business owned by a Jehovah's witness might not allow blood transfusions in the health plan. A business owned by a Muslim might require the employees to face Mecca at prayer time. I could go on, but you can see that it is best to let each employee decide for himself or herself, freely and without coercion, how to practice religion. If the law requires that an employer offer contraceptive benefits, that law should apply to all employers. Of course Orthodox Catholics may decline to use the contraception benefit, but that is the true application of religious freedom.

The college's position would be more credible if it were consistent. I note that Belmont Abbey has upon its premises, and collects rent from, two pharmacies which sell contraceptive products including emergency contraception. Why didn't they put a clause in the lease that these activities were forbidden? If one makes money from the event, it's right, but if one has to help pay for the event it's wrong?

If health issues unique to men were not covered and health issue unique to women were not covered the college would not be discriminating and I would have no complaint. The problem is picking and choosing among them.

I have had bosses who are Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Orthodox Christian, Protestant, Wankan Tanka, and even some with the strange name "Presbyterian" in countries ranging from the Baltics, Balkans, Central Europe, Latin America, and Asia as well as several in the USA. Nobody ever tried to force me to accept their practices before Belmont Abbey. Not once. Not in any place. Not any religion. This action is the very face of intolerance. They are saying: "If you won't adopt our religious practices you are not welcome here, period." Being unwelcome I left, the first time in a long career that I did not leave an employer on cordial terms.

President Thierfelder believes that the college's Catholic identity depends on its being allowed to deny the standard of care to women. Apparently a curriculum based on the best that the Catholic intellectual tradition has to offer and a relentless pursuit to "find God in all things" counts for little or nothing in this regard. What a sad commentary that is on the state of Catholic higher education!

By David Neipert, author, attorney, senior Fulbright scholar in law, and former associate professor of international business at Belmont Abbey College.

Originally published on rhrealitycheck.org.

Black Friday 2009: Walmart Shares Strategy For Crowd Control

2009-11-11T16:40:39Z

A year after a Wal-Mart worker was trampled to death by a massive crowd of bargain-hunting shoppers, the retail giant is implementing new crowd control measures to handle the crush that typically accompanies the day after Thanksgiving -- Black Friday.

Wal-Mart, Amazon, Target In DVD Price War

2009-11-08T09:50:30Z

NEW YORK — First it was books. Now it's DVDs.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. started another price war Thursday, trimming the online preorder prices of some upcoming DVDs following its price cut on books last month. And, once again, competitors Amazon.com and Target scrambled to match the prices.

Amazon Wal-Mart Price War: Who's The Battle Really Against?

2009-11-02T12:26:26Z

Amazon and Wal-Mart hardly seem reckless, though. So why did they go to war? The answer is that they didn't, really. Sure, Wal-Mart is making a statement that it's a player in the online world, but the real goal of this conflict isn't to lure readers away from Amazon, and it isn't to get people to buy one of those ten books.

Trish Kinney: The Case of the Walmart Photos, and Beyond

2009-10-30T18:49:21Z

A father of three young girls dropped off a memory stick to the local Walmart to have over 100 family photos printed. Walmart staff felt that some of the nude images were inappropriate, beyond normal innocent childhood bath photos, and per their store policy should be referred to the police for further review. The police agreed with Walmart and began an investigation. Child Protective Services and the Attorney General's office were brought in which led to the children being temporarily removed from the home. The wife, a teacher, was suspended for the duration of the investigation. No charges were brought against the parents and they have since filed two law suits, against Walmart and the State, City, and Attorney General.

Public response initially ran overwhelmingly in favor of the parents in this case. It would be fair to say that most were outraged at what happened to this family and see absolutely nothing wrong with taking cute photos of kids in a bubble bath, a tradition in so many families. Many assumptions about the photos and the case have been made in blogs and related comments, despite the fact that the photos in question have not been released. Were it to be discovered that those assumptions were correct, their outrage may be justified. But we have only to look at the police report, now a public document, to see that this case is far more complex than it seems.

Many complained that a Walmart photo clerk should not have the power to analyze appropriateness of family photos and notify the police. In fact, the police report confirmed that their interaction was with the Walmart store manager and assistant store manager, not the clerk. The police examined the photos at the store and agreed that a handful of them could be construed as either child pornography or erotica. That set the investigation into motion. In separate interviews at separate times, both parents conceded that they understood how the police would find the photos disturbing. The father told the police that he had no plans for the photos but when asked directly by the interviewer whether he would display them in a family photo album, he answered no.

A search of the home found seven cameras and additional nude photos of the children, as well as videos. The confiscated nude images were not limited to bath time play. They included opening birthday presents in the nude, singing and running around the house in the nude, nude shots taken in the kitchen, and shots that appeared to be posed taken on the floor of a bedroom featuring the anus and vagina. The parents are seen in a video encouraging their nude children to "shake that booty," referring to it as a "burlesque show." The wife is heard saying "that's the most I've seen of the female anatomy" as the girls stick their butts to the camera, proclaiming "nice shot," as the father zooms in. There are nude photos of two of the children with legs spread out, each on a different swing, exposing the vagina, another inside the house with both legs spread out shot from behind with a close-up on the vagina. There is a photo of the father seated in the bathtub with one of the girls nude standing above him. One of the girls, the parents reported, routinely sheds her clothes each time she returns home. They call her a "nudist." The father reiterated that he understood why the police were there and why they might find the photos "troubling." He said the photos were not troubling to him because he knew the intent behind them. The wife said she understood why the photos would be alarming since there were so many naked pictures.

During interviews, one of the girls reported that she tickles her own "vagina" but doesn't know who taught her to do that. She said her mother tickles her around her "private" which is the part she uses for "peeing" and it feels good. She said her mom tickles her outside of her naked butt with no clothes on. She pulls down her "undies" and pulls up her shirt and then her mom tickles her, but not inside which is the "important" part. It was noted that the child rubbed or touched her vagina several times during the interview. She also stated that her parents took pictures of her in the shower.

The attorney for the parents has been loud in the media, decrying the unfair treatment of his clients. In an article in the local paper, he claimed to be unafraid of "reasonable people seeing these pictures and understanding the context within which they were taken," adding that "there's nothing immoral, illegal, or unethical about genitalia." He talks a lot about the parents and their feelings, their rights, their lawsuit, their damages, their "intent" and whether it could ever be demonstrated that the photos were meant for "child sexual exploitation."

While the actions of these parents may not rise to the legal definition of child sexual exploitation, you have to wonder if there isn't some exploitation involved. I haven't heard the attorney utter one word about the feelings, rights or damages related to these little girls, ages 18 months to 5 years at the time. If it's about the intent of the person taking the photograph as he is so fond of saying, what about the child who is being photographed? Where is the consideration for its effect on her, both short and long term?

Technically these parents may not be breaking any laws in the manner in which they are raising their daughters. But it would be hard to argue that these children are not living in a sexualized environment. The parents have not provided boundaries for them as to their bodies or their personal privacy. They have introduced them at a very young age to flaunting their bodies for entertainment, to posing nude for the camera on a regular basis during all types of activities, and to the pleasure of their mother's touch in private areas. I believe, however, that the parents do think it harmless or they would not expose themselves voluntarily to the court system where the family culture will be on trial, not a handful of photos that were dropped off at Walmart. But most parents who sexualize their home environment are not aware of its inappropriateness and the possible long term damage it can cause to a child. And therein lies the problem. A sexualized home environment meets the needs of the parent, not the child. "If it feels good, do it" may be a popular adult philosophy to live by, but not the best parenting philosophy. The parents obviously enjoy not just their children's routine nudity and nude play, but they also enjoy documenting it. Their children are the object of that enjoyment and have no real choice in the matter.

I know something about what happens to a child raised in a sexually charged environment when that child becomes an adult. It is the subject of my book, Silver Platter Girl. No, don't listen to the lawyer when he says that the parents are the victims in this story. The real victims are three little girls.

Praveen Madan: Evolve or Die: Why Reinvent Independent Bookstores?

2009-10-29T10:25:20Z

A year ago we visited San Francisco’s new California Academy
of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.
This is one of the city’s new cultural hot spots. As we walked among the high-tech
exhibits on the natural world, we came across a 20-foot long quote written in
giant yellow letters attributed to Charles Darwin: "It is not
the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most
responsive to change." We had
just passed our one year anniversary of assuming ownership of the Booksmith and
had been compulsively analyzing all aspects of our new vocation. Our conversation turned towards the
state of independent booksellers and whether the theory of evolution applied to
independent bookstores as a species.
You might guess our conclusion.

Independent bookstores are heading towards extinction

Just in case you have been hibernating the past fifteen
years and missed all the stories of independent bookstores closing, owners
blaming Amazon, and newspapers complaining that people don’t read, here is what
the hard numbers on the state of independent booksellers look like. In 1993, the American Booksellers
Association (ABA) had 4,700 member stores. By the start of 2009, the number had fallen to 1,600. We are seeing an average of about 200 independent
bookstores close every year.

The financial health of independent bookstores back up this
dismal picture. According to ABA’s
Abacus survey, about a third of all bookstores are profitable with average
profit margins of less than 5%, another third are breaking even, and another
third are already losing money.
Add in e-books, add in increasing discounts at Amazon, add in a slow
economic recovery, and you can see where this is going. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist
to draw a straight line through the declining numbers of bookstores and
conclude that in another 5 to 7 years finding a bookstore would become similar
to finding a needle in a haystack.

So, what the hell happened?

In our last blog post, we made the case that good
independent bookstores are more than a place to buy a book. So, you might ask, if independent
bookstores do all these wonderful things like being “a cultural experience,”
“an author incubator” and “a community leader”, then why are they heading
towards extinction. The answer is
rather simple. Doing wonderful
things doesn’t grant us immunity from competition, nor does it stop our
habitat, the bookselling market, from evolving. These are forces beyond our individual control.

Soon after stumbling onto Darwin’s quote, we took a couple
days off for a strategy retreat.
We had the inside experience of owning and managing an independent
bookstore, and it was time to act like our own consultants and ask some hard
hitting questions about our business and strategy. Top of the list was the evergreen question that had never
failed to throw the most organized clients (in our previous consulting careers)
into utter confusion and chaos.
Who is your competition?
This seemingly simple question requires people to incessantly debate:
What business are we in? Who is our customer? and What are we competing for?

Using the whiteboard in our living room (yes, there is one)
we started to list everyone we were competing with. We ran out of space because the whiteboard wasn’t big
enough. At the broadest level we
consider ourselves to be providers of a cultural experience, and therefore we
are competing for mindshare of customers and joining us in the fray are
museums, exhibitions, arts and lecture venues, movies, concerts, etc, etc. At the narrowest level, we consider
ourselves simply booksellers, and therefore we are competing for sales of books
with everyone from WalMart and Target to the more than one million individuals
selling books on Amazon’s marketplace.
Even the taxpayer-funded San Francisco public library now sells books it
receives for free as donations.

Amidst this explosion of cultural and book buying choices
for consumers, the independent bookstore has been caught as the proverbial deer
in the headlights. Nothing paints
this picture more starkly than the failure of independent bookstores to take
advantage of the internet.
Independent bookstores account for 10% of the total retail market for
books, but on the internet our combined market share is less than a tenth of 1%. In terms of cultural experiences,
authors who previously launched their books at readings in independent
bookstores, often command fat fees for appearing at big venues funded by deep
pocketed foundations and wealthy non-profit organizations. In San Francisco, bookstores are competing for author events with the well-endowed
City Arts & Lectures and even the local Jewish Community Center.

The bottom-line is that the market, the competition, and
consumer tastes are all evolving rapidly while independent booksellers are
stuck somewhere circa 1975 with our DOS based inventory systems, creaky floors,
chipping paint on the walls, and dusty books.

But wait, the game isn’t over yet

So far, you haven’t heard anything new. We believe this is a time of great
opportunity for independent bookstores.
What? Go back and read that
again. Wait a minute, didn’t we
just write the obituary of the independent bookstore.

We believe that independent bookstores can have a great
future and we are betting our careers on it. What makes us optimistic in the face of all the doom and
gloom surrounding independent bookstores?
New opportunities that can help independent bookstores reinvent and
reinvigorate their businesses. New
opportunities being made possible by a publishing industry in turmoil, new
opportunities being served up by new technologies, new opportunities we can
identify if we pay attention to the unmet needs of our customers. Here is a short list of five such new
opportunities we see:

Literary Community Building: Technology is enabling more
and more people to work from home and shop from home and in the process
creating a huge unmet need for people to find venues where they can meet and
talk with other people. We are
social animals and all of us crave meaningful social interaction. Independent bookstores should find new
ways to bring people together to talk about books and ideas.

Author Services: Publishers are abandoning the work they
used to do to market and promote authors and in the process creating an
opportunity for independent bookstores to step in and fill this gap. Independent bookstores should partner
with their local authors in new and creative ways to promote their books and
they will have their loyalty and goodwill for years to come.

Enhancing the Browsing Experience: Despite all innovations
in technology, no website still comes close to the actual experience of
browsing in a well-curated bookstore.
Browsing is not about the hurried search for a book you already know you
want, but instead a search for something new, it’s about the discovery and
surprise, it’s about letting yourself explore new uncharted territory. The last big innovation in improving
the browsing experience in bookstores was when stores put in cafes and seating
to let customers sit down and enjoy their picks. What’s the next innovation that will enrich and enhance the
browsing experience?

Print on Demand: Over half the cost in the supply chain for
books goes towards moving books around from warehouses to warehouses, from
warehouses to stores, from back offices to shelving carts to shelves, and so
on. The inevitable digitization of
books coupled with availability of affordable print on demand solutions at the
retail level has the potential to be a game changer in favor of brick and
mortar bookstores. Not only can print on demand dramatically increase the
selection of books we can make available to our customers, but it’s also an
environmentally sound solution and can help reduce cost of carrying large stock
of books.

New Markets: Only half of adult Americans read books. What about the other half? Television service reaches 97% of Americans,
and over 75% use the internet. Why have we, as an industry, settled for only 50% penetration. While WalMart and Amazon drive each
others profits down by engaging in price wars for bestsellers, we should be
focusing on developing the next generation of readers and bringing books to
those who haven’t discovered them yet.
Introduce someone to a book they really love and they will come back for
more. Who’s our competition
here? We have smart kids working
in our bookstores who can provide better book recommendations after six months
of work experience than Amazon has been able to generate after fifteen years of
tweaking it’s recommendation algorithms.

Call to Action

Evolve or Die!
The writing is clear on the wall.
The book business is going through a phase of massive disruption. We have to prepare ourselves for a
future in which bookstores won’t need large inventory of paper books, in fact
we might not even need paper books at all, and we might not need expensive
retail spaces. This future is
going to look very different than what the book market looks like today. It’s already happened in the music
business. Survival will require
adapting and evolving to this new environment. We must explore new services, experiment with new revenue
models, and evangelize our value to our communities. We have a few years to build a new business model that will
enable us to continue spreading the love of long-form reading and critical
thinking to people. We must not
obsess about the fake battle between print and e-books, but focus instead on
literacy, diversity, dialog, and community engagement – all of which are real
issues despite all the advancements in technology. This is not about being pro or anti technology, this is
about embracing technology to solve real problems. This is not about being pro or anti corporations, this is
about using the best the corporate world has to offer to build strong local
communities built around real people interacting with other real people. Independent bookstores must view
themselves as start-ups in a world full of opportunity. Sure, we are having an existential
crisis right now. But remember we
are fighting the thousand year war against ignorance, closed minds, and a
homogenized culture. The war will
be only be over when we stop fighting.

In our next blog post…

We will discuss our progress in building the independent
bookstore for the 21st century at the Booksmith in San Francisco. Join us to learn about the aha moments
and oh-shit moments we have had as we jumped into a business we knew nothing
about.

In the meantime, let’s discuss…

What new opportunities do you see for independent
bookstores?

______________________________________________________________________________

Post Scriptum: As we were doing our fact checking for this article, we found that the quote so famously and widely attributed to Darwin apparently does not come from him. Here is an article in the Guardian about people misquoting Darwin. Talk about spreading misinformation. Even the California Academy of Sciences screwed up!

Walmart Caskets For Sale Online, Starting At $999 (PHOTOS)

2009-10-28T20:42:29Z

Never mind its typical merchandise, the world's largest retailer has a new item on the shelf.

You can now purchase Walmart caskets, a development that could threaten funeral homes. Beginning at $999 for lower-end models, all 27 caskets in the Walmart online inventory cost less than $2,000, except the "Sienna Bronze Casket," which sells for $3,199. The caskets come from Star Legacy Funeral Network, Inc., of McHenry, Ill., and ship within 48 hours.

Blogs are having fun with this one. Several noted it's just in time for Halloween. One pointed out that this gives people a chance to live eternally with low prices. The topic is popping up on forums too.

Would you rest the soul of a loved one with a product purchased from Walmart?

PHOTOS:

27 Walmart Caskets Are Up For Sale

The Most Expensive Walmart Casket Is The Sienna Bronze Casket

Walmart Caskets Can Be Purchased For As Low As $999

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/28/wal-mart-caskets-urns-off_n_337366.html

William Petrocelli: Not a Simple Price War -- It's a Fight Over What You Get to Read

2009-10-28T10:25:31Z

What looks like a simple price war between Amazon, Target, and Walmart over a handful of bestsellers is symptomatic of a much deeper problem in the book business. The larger fight is really over what you get to read.

The price war began Oct 15 when Walmart.com dropped its prices drastically on several bestsellers. Amazon.com and Target.com quickly followed suit, and within a couple of days the prices were down to $8.99 and heading lower. At this point, these behemoths were clearly selling those books below cost and engaging in an illegal form of predatory pricing.

The authors affected by this price-slashing were not amused. James Patterson said "Imagine if somebody was selling DVDs of this week's new movies for $5. You wouldn't be able to make movies." John Grisham's agent added, "I think we underestimate the effect to which extremely discounted best sellers take the consumer's attention away from emerging writers." (N.Y. Times, Oct. 17, 2009). The American Booksellers Association saw things the same way, saying in a letter to Christine Varney, Head of the Anti-Trust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, that these companies are using books as loss leaders to sell other kinds of merchandise. "The entire book industry is in danger of becoming collateral damage in this war." (Bookweb.org, Oct. 22, 2009)

Predatory pricing is a means of driving other booksellers out of business. When this happens, the choice of books is one of the first things to suffer. Some readers think that if their favorite store closes they can always buy the book they want somewhere else. But that's a dangerous delusion -- the books they want may not be there at all. In fact, these types of disruptions in how books are sold or distributed has a profound effect on what publishers decide to publish in the first place.

Think of the book business as a giant funnel, in which millions of authors are trying to reach tens of millions of readers. The image is a telling one, because the literary life of America has to go through two very narrow choke points: publishing and bookselling. Both of these choke points have become more and more constricted in recent years as a result of economic concentration and market manipulation.

Publishing is now consolidated in the hands of a few large conglomerates that control most of what is published in America. There are, to be sure, many booklovers in the publishing divisions of these giant corporations, but they are outnumbered and out-maneuvered by the bean-counters. Sadly, many of these publishing divisions could probably be shutdown entirely without having any significant affect on the bottom-line of the parent corporations. It is not an atmosphere that favors innovation or literary discoveries. In many cases the attitude seems to be to hold on and hope that declining sales and stagnant readership doesn't cost you your job.

Concentration at the retail level is now becoming even worse. The chain stores had been doing their best to squeeze out the independent stores over the last 20 years or so, and now they in turn are being squeezed by the mass merchandisers. According to retailing expert Stacey Mitchell, big-box mass merchandisers, like Wal-Mart, Target, and Costco, have taken over 30 percent of the book market. These mass merchandisers are now selling as many books as Barnes & Noble and Borders combined. (Death of the Category Killers, June 28, 2009)

It's hard to exaggerate the consequences of this mass-merchandiser dominance. These outlets carry, at most, a few hundred titles at any given time. This means that a handful of books -- far less than 1% of all the books published -- are probably accounting now for more than 30% of all sales in America. Price wars in this segment of the market only make matters worse, driving more customers to these merchandisers in search of quick bargains on a handful of big-name books. Publishers are under more and more pressure to subsidize these new, ruinous prices, and they will probably end up pushing more and more of their resources in that direction. But it's a devil's deal. The time may not be far off when publishers decide they can make more money by shrinking their breadth of titles and concentrating even more on just a few bestsellers.

How does a new author break into this landscape? It's never been easy. The key has always been diversity at the retail level. There's a big difference, say, between 500 buyers all buying for their own stores and one chain-buyer purchasing for 500 outlets. Buyers for independent stores tend to cancel out each other's mistakes; no single error in judgment can sink a prospective literary career. But when the system is dominated by a small handful of powerful buyers, their decision can make or break a book. Often, there is no appeal from such a decision. One of the dirty little secrets of the book business is that publishers often check in advance with the buyers for the chain stores and mass merchandisers before agreeing to publish a book. If the answer they get is no, the book may never see the light of day.

One of the ironies of the current price war is that it includes The Lacuna, the latest novel by Barbara Kingsolver. But Kingsolver wasn't always a best-selling author. When her first novel The Bean Trees was published in a modest print-run in 1988, independent booksellers recognized it as a literary treasure and sold thousands of copies. After that the chain stores climbed on the band-wagon, but without that first push from independent booksellers Kingsolver's career might never have taken off.

Anyone who loves books should worry that the doors seem to be closing on the Barbara Kingsolvers of tomorrow.

Gregory Maguire's New Novel Is Free

2009-10-22T13:08:44Z

The Next Queen of Heaven, a new novel by Wicked author Gregory Maguire, is available starting today for the low, low price of $0.00. That's not a typo. Queen is the third title from the year-old Concord Free Press, which is giving away 2,500 copies of the book (half through its website and half through select independent bookstores) to readers who agree to make a donation "to a local charity, someone who needs it, or a stranger on the street."