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In Wal-Mart's world, there is accounting for taste. For instance, the video section stocks the risque comedy There's Something About Mary. And there's something in it that more than a few folks would find objectionable. Says movie buyer Eddie Tutt: "It's pretty crude, but [the movie] did $175 million in sales, which kind of tells you that most of the public looked at it and probably felt good about it." Which tells Tutt that unlike, say, Howard Stern's crude movie, Private Parts, which Wal-Mart did not carry, Mary will light up the cash registers.
Yet Wal-Mart customers are not of one mind on some of society's more complicated matters, as it learned with Preven. The primary ingredient in Preven is ethinyl estradiol/levonorgestrel--the same as in birth control pills--given in a high dose. The package also contains a pregnancy test. Although Wal-Mart wouldn't stock Preven, it has always sold birth control pills.
Earlier this year, Planned Parenthood sent women to Wal-Mart stores with "emergency" prescriptions for birth control pills, not Preven by name. A few pharmacists refused to fill them, some apparently under the false impression that these drugs will terminate a pregnancy, as opposed to preventing one.
Planned Parenthood pressed the company for a clarification on its pharmacy policy. Wal-Mart then sent a directive to each of its pharmacists requiring them to fulfill any emergency prescription, which is consistent with the American Pharmaceutical Association's code of ethics. Any pharmacist whose personal beliefs prevented him from filling such a prescription must find someone who will. So day-after contraception is available, even if, for business reasons, Preven is not. "We don't care what their motivation is," says Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood, who gives the company good marks for its responsiveness. "Our concern is that women can get emergency contraception."
The Preven controversy, among others, has prompted Wal-Mart to reconsider some of its laissez-faire policies. The company recently established an ethics committee, to which buyers and other Wal-Mart employees can refer any knotty issue. As Wal-Mart continues to grow internationally, the committee will no doubt get busier. Certainly the medical-ethics front will get murkier. "We are only at the tip of the iceberg," says Soderquist. "There will be lots of issues that will come up: suicide pills, genetic engineering. Can they prescribe pills that alter the genes?"
And even before we get there, the nation's biggest shopkeeper will be less able to stick to its preferred role as an agnostic buyer for the masses. There's a world full of outraged parents, students, environmentalists, activists, politicians and stockholders complaining with equal fervor about the silly and the serious. Says Glass: "The public in general becomes a little harder to serve all the time. But you have to respond to that." In other words, Wal-Mart is no longer a free agent.
--With reporting by David E. Thigpen