Wal-Mart's Cultural Strategy

"Wal-Mart has synthesized both extremes and perfected an urban-corporate encounter of a third kind: the community sell. Hell-bent on winning voter approval next month to open its first Southland Supercenter store in Inglewood, Wal-Mart has been running an aggressive PR campaign that goes beyond mere images in a bigger appeal to racial progress and solidarity across class lines that we haven’t seen or heard since the days of Dr. King... What’s also likely helping the Inglewood campaign, oddly enough, is the fact that Wal-Mart has become almost synonymous with labor issues. Rallying blacks around labor causes in Los Angeles, where employment demographics have shifted radically and the major union-organizing and living-wage movements of the last decade have been closely associated with Latinos, has been difficult."

Thanks to Laura Kranz