February 23, 2006

The Wal-Mart Nation

I watched an interview with Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott the other day. He deflected concern about disgruntled employees, noting that with 1.5 million employees Wal-Mart would have lots of dissention even if only a small percentage were unhappy.

Indeed, if one percent of Wal-Mart employees were upset, that would be a small percentage but a large absolute number: 150,000 people!

Scott also defended the company's position on providing healthcare insurance to its employees...or NOT providing it, as the case is.

Last night ABC News featured a story about the per capita spending on healthcare in the United States. As I recall, it was somewhere around $6,500, compared with about $2,500 in each comparable Western European nation. The figure was around $700 for Costa Rico! One out of every five dollars spent by a company is for healthcare coverage. The situation has spun way out of control.

Malcolm Gladwell recently wrote about the importance of companies becoming involved in the improvement of public issues such as healthcare. After all, he argues, healthcare insurance is what is burying the Great American Corporate Giants like GM and Ford. It's doing a pretty good job clobbering us little guys too!

It seems to me that we need to use our communications skills to encourage more businesses to confront our country's crises like healthcare and public education. Both systems are seriously out of whack. Thomas Friedman hits the education nail on the head in "The World is Flat."

We all need to figure out how to be part of the solution. How can we use the skills we have to solve these problems?

As for Wal-Mart, even without providing healthcare insurance, the company is having some tough times. Year-over-year store sales increases have lagged way behind Target. So the company plans to remodel nearly half of the U.S. stores, strengthen its marketing, and expand its line of urban clothing.

Ads are dropping "always low prices" in favor of "look beyond the basics," in an effort to get customers with money to spend it on something beyond paper towels and dishwasher soap.

Can Wal-Mart win its customers? I don't see how, unless they win their employees.

And to win their employees, it seems to me that they not only need to provide healthcare insurance but they also have to play a much more pro-active role in getting this country to solve its healthcare crisis.