Many thanks to Ming Kwan at Wikinomics for pointing out that Wal-Mart has pulled the plug on its Facebook site. [If you don't know it, the backstory is here.] Since I never did join just to read the discussion, I’m excerpting their last post from Ming’s:

Linda (Wal-Mart) wrote
at 5:58pm on October 18th, 2007
I’ve been keeping up with the posts. While we created the Roommate Match program hoping to generate conversation about cool Wal-mart merchandise, most people who took the time to comment wanted to talk about what Wal-Mart stands for and how the company operates. I am not at all surprised by this. There are hundreds of news stories about the company each day. My family and friends ask questions about what they read and hear. Here’s what I’m proud to tell them . . . the company creates thousands of jobs each year, three out of four store managers started their careers in hourly positions, almost all employees have health insurance. I have watched as things improved during my time with the company and expect us to continue to improve on the things we already do well and fix things we could still improve. Now that students are back at college, this program will wind down. We’ll close up shop October 31st. Until then, let’s keep talking.

Let’s look closely at Linda’s excuses for her friends and family:

1. “the company creates thousands of jobs each year”

If a company that size didn’t create thousands of jobs each year there’d be something mighty wrong with it. The problem is the kind of jobs does Wal-Mart create, not whether they create any.

2. “three out of four store managers started their careers in hourly positions”

Let’s stipulate that there are 400 positions at an average Wal-Mart. Maybe one of them gets to be a store manager someday (which is ). What happens to the other 399 people? I’d call this the great Wal-Mart lottery except store manager is hardly the kindest job in the world.

3. “almost all employees have health insurance”

Leave aside the fact that most of them don’t get their insurance from Wal-Mart, what kind of health insurance do they have? The answer to that question is that most employees don’t get their health insurance from Wal-Mart.

Poor Edelman! If this is the best Wal-Mart can do, they’ll be taking huge public relations hits for well into the foreseeable future.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 1320 by Jonathan Rees and is filed under Edelman, Public Relations. 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.