Wal-Mart Tries to Fix Its Image

As part of a national image-polishing campaign, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will play host to nearly 100 journalists this week for meetings with top executives and tours of its Bentonville, Ark., home office.

The two-day conference is intended to help “set the record straight” on issues such as employee benefits and global factory standards, said Wal-Mart spokesman Gus Whitcomb. After struggling with bad press for several years, the world’s largest retailer also hopes to create something less tangible -- a bond with reporters.

“We want people to have the opportunity to meet [Chief Executive] Lee Scott, to learn that we’re human beings and to see firsthand what is the Wal-Mart story,” Whitcomb said. (The Times was invited and is participating.)

But the company also will have to contend with about a dozen gate-crashers from Inglewood -- including a minister, a city councilman and a member of the California Assembly -- who plan to offer reporters their own, less flattering version of the story.

Their Wal-Mart is a bully that destroys good jobs and union wages and pushes into communities where it isn’t wanted.

“They’re very persistent,” said Inglewood Councilman Ralph Franklin, who helped defeat a Wal-Mart-sponsored ballot initiative a year ago that would have allowed the company to obtain permits to build a Wal-Mart Supercenter without a public hearing or an environmental impact study.

Franklin said Wal-Mart had bought the land and was continuing to draw up plans to develop the site. “They need to know the community still has concerns,” he said.

Those concerns, which cover employee wages and benefits and the overall economic effect of a Wal-Mart on their community, will be detailed in a written proposal that Franklin and others hope to hand-deliver to Scott on Tuesday as he enters the gathering of reporters.

Timed for maximum exposure, the action illustrates why Wal-Mart’s months-long public relations campaign is such an uphill battle: Nearly anything it does can be used against it.

“We’re not trying to be mean-spirited,” said Elliott Petty, a Coalition for a Better Inglewood organizer. “We just want them to know this is our community and we have certain standards.”

Petty said the coalition would be willing to discuss a Wal-Mart development in the city but only under certain conditions that might be difficult for the company to meet.

Wal-Mart spokesman Pete Kanelos confirmed that the company had bought a 60-acre vacant parcel in Inglewood last year, soon after voters soundly rejected the company’s proposal for the site near the Hollywood Park racetrack. Kanelos said Wal-Mart was studying options for development.

“At this time, we are in the very preliminary stages of planning,” he said. “Before any plans are submitted, we fully intend to seek input from the city and community members, and it is our intention to try to make any project match up with the city’s vision of its economic future.”