Citing low demand, Walmart is pulling seafood from a number of its superstores in Florida. Given Walmart’s track record with meat, perhaps customers are taking charge by avoiding what they percieve to be a less than trustworthy source.

It has nothing to do with British Petroleum’s massive dump in the Gulf. No. Nothing at all. Move along.

From The Palm Beach Post News:

On Wednesday, a state agricultural official told a panel looking into the economic impact of the spill that Wal-Mart was discontinuing the sale of fresh seafood in its stores. Nelson Mongiovi, marketing director for the Department of Agriculture, told the state’s Oil Spill Economic Recovery Task Force that Wal-Mart’s action was because of a decline in demand.

But Bob Jones, executive director of the Southeastern Fisheries Association, acknowledged that higher prices for Gulf seafood and a drop in demand for the products since the massive oil leak began three months ago could explain Wal-Mart’s decision.

And the chain’s action, for whatever reason, doesn’t bode well for the $1 billion-a-year seafood industry in Florida, which mostly supplied the chain with snapper and grouper.

“It does sound bad for us to say that Wal-Mart stopped the fresh seafood even though they didn’t explicitly say Florida seafood,” Jones said. “People are afraid to eat any kind of seafood from the Gulf of Mexico because of the publicity that there’s millions of barrels of oil and thousands of gallons of (detergents) and questions about what’s the water like, because of the perception that the waters and the fish are bad. That’s just the way it is.”

And how big is BP CEO Tony Hayward’s retirement package?

Jeff Hess: Have Coffee Will Write.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 1045 by Jeff Hess and is filed under Energy, Environment, Meat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.