'Outing' Wal-Mart

Fortune: Wal-Mart Sees Green.

Another shallow treatment of Wal-Mart's green "epiphany." Would someone please do a critical analysis of the economic opportunism of a global giant's awakening?

Sustainablog: "I'm still holding my breath, and holding onto my wallet..."

My response to Jeff and overall take:

Not sure if I'd call it a "miss," Jeff, but something to consider. With gas headed toward $100/barrel-plus, globalization imploding and the nation's highway infrastructure deteriorating, Wal-Mart literally cannot continue to do business in the factory-farm, truck-and-air dependent way that cheap oil enabled. It's done the math! You can't fly cherries from Chile to New York for $3.99 a pound. So it asks Rocky Mt Institute to help it find new (hopefully cheaper) sources of transporation and energy. It signs up organic/local farmers to help it save on distribution costs. It brings Al Gore and Greenpeace and others in and says, What are we missing?

Yes Wal-Mart can undersell fair trade coffee and organic lettuce...till it buys out all the competition, as happened with globalization in places like Jamaica and Guatemala. The local farmers sell out or go broke, then prices start climbing. Here in Washington we used to be able to buy apples for 69 cents a pound. Heck they were falling off the trees a 3-hr. drive away. With globalization the orchards are gone or depleted, and an apple here costs the same as in Florida. The exception is farmers markets in the fall, when you can still get them for $1.50 or so (inflation and gas-adjusted from the 69 cents). The lettuce I'm buying for $1.75 at Saturday markets here is twice as big as the $1.99 lettuce in the supermarkets -- plus fresher and organic to boot! What's to stop Wal-Mart from buying out even the last few local farmers especially if it can save itself a buck or two? Why not convert to biodiesel at 75 cents a gallon and call yourself "green"?

The bottom line is still the bottom line. But why not make PR hay at the same time? And by the way, it can write off losses (it would suffer no matter what it does) as R&D or new business "investments."

Sure this is the cynical line, but it's also the capitalist/realist POV. A crack economist would diagnose Wal-Mart's altruism in a flash as what's good for green is good for greed.

-- Paul Andrews, GreenforGood

global warming ecological footprint carbon footprint GreenforGood sustainability green lifestyle Wal-Mart