Walk into most any Wal-Mart in the U.S. and here are a few of the things you can buy: condoms, birth control pills, hunting rifles, "Western" style toy guns, the movie There's Something About Mary, the National Enquirer, cigarettes, the video game South Park, the hard-rocking Powerman 5000's hit Tonight the Stars Revolt. And here are a few of the things you can't buy: a "day-after" birth control kit, handguns, authentic-looking plastic guns, Playboy, rolling papers, the movie South Park, the video game Grand Theft Auto and any number of rap CDs.
Inconsistent? Absolutely, and deliberately so. "We're a family store," says Wal-Mart CEO David Glass, and "we try to have something for everyone." And just as in real families, there is conflict about who gets what. Last week the company was pinned by a consumer who demanded that a World Wrestling Federation action doll be yanked from the shelves because both the wrestler it depicted, Al Snow, and the doll carry a prop that looks like a woman's severed head.
It was the latest in a series of controversies in which the company, by virtue of its enormous size and reach, has played an unwanted role as a sort of national conscience, discount division. Wal-Mart has been accused of being both censor and nanny, condemned as a promoter of demon rum and slave labor, and cited as both a friend and a foe of the environment. "We don't want to be America's moral conscience," says Don Soderquist, senior vice chairman. "The watchword for all of our people is 'Do what is right.' That's what we really preach and teach and we want, but there's so much gray."
And wherever there's gray, black, as in ink, is not far behind. Earlier this year, Wal-Mart infuriated some women's groups when it declined to stock Preven, an emergency day-after contraception kit available by prescription. Antiabortion groups hailed the decision as one for their side. But Wal-Mart's rationale was simpler--perhaps too much so: its pharmacies don't stock every drug available; Preven was going to be a small seller, customers were not clamoring for it, and the item was pricey ($25). "You can't carry everything. Sometimes you get credit for making a moral judgment when you're not," says Glass. Similarly, when Glass pulled handguns from the shelves in 1994, the company cited sales more than ethics, although he notes that by then there were more negatives in stocking handguns than positives.
Glass is certain that some of the books, videos and other products in the stores he would personally find offensive. He just doesn't know what they are. "When you have 100,000 unique SKUs," he says, using the retailer's term for an item--a stock keeping unit--"something is going to irritate somebody."
That would be, for instance, Kevin Clarke, a mild-mannered carpet salesman from Mentor, Ohio, and a loyal Wal-Mart customer, who went ballistic after his son bought a CD by a band named Godsmack that he thought God-awful, particularly a ditty called Voodoo, which seemed to be about suicide. Wal-Mart has long had a policy of banning so-called stickered CDs, those carrying a warning label that the content might not be suitable for children. But Godsmack was stickerless, so Wal-Mart stocked it, until Clarke hollered.