Another “Wal-Mart Loses Focus” Move
The fact that Wal-Mart has done what follows isn’t what is significant. It’s the fact that company management felt they had to blast their trumpets to the world about it:
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AdAge.com) — In an unprecedented push, Wal-Mart Stores has hired a gay-marketing shop, joined the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce and begun discussions with activist groups about extending domestic-partnership benefits to its employees.
The belief in the executive suites in Bentonville must be, “Let’s join some big gay organization and make nice about domestic-partner benefits, and maybe everyone will leave us alone.”
No. They won’t.
I also don’t see how the company will be able to simultaneously absorb the cost of extending domestic-partnership benefits to gay and straight couples AND improve the overall health-care coverage setup it is so derided for.
Does anyone think the UFCW will back off because domestic partners have access to what the union sees as totally inadequate health benefits?
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UPDATE: A story in the Dayton Daily News (does not require registration at the moment) has the news, and all of the predictable reactions.
UPDATE 2: In a Washington Post op-ed today, Sebastian Mallaby wraps it up (HT Right Angle Blog) by saying –
For a party that needs the votes of Wal-Mart’s customers, this is a questionable strategy. But there is more than politics at stake. According to a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research by Jerry Hausman and Ephraim Leibtag, neither of whom received funding from Wal-Mart, big-box stores led by Wal-Mart reduce families’ food bills by one-fourth. Because Wal-Mart’s price-cutting also has a big impact on the non-food stuff it peddles, it saves U.S. consumers upward of $200 billion a year, making it a larger booster of family welfare than the federal government’s $33 billion food-stamp program.
How can centrist Democrats respond to that? By beating up Wal-Mart and forcing it to focus on public relations rather than opening new stores, Democrats are harming the poor Americans they claim to speak for.
My message to Wal-Mart would be: Please don’t allow them to lead you into screwing it up. There’s every sign that this is exactly what you’re doing.
