BusinessWeek, for instance, which describes the retailer as “a cult masquerading as a company,â€쳌 quotes critics who excoriate Wal-Mart for lobbying to thwart tariffs on foreign goods, when few legitimate economists even on the Left believe that high tariffs would be good for the American consumer or the U.S. economy.

Some of the critical drumbeat doubtless reflects the fact that Wal-Mart and its founding family still promote causes and values that the mainstream media oppose. Sam Walton supported conservative and free-market groups. His family has continued his tradition, supporting groups like the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm that frequently represents small business against government regulation; and the National Right to Work Legal Defense & Education Foundation, which fights compulsory unionism. Walton’s son John is a key supporter of charter schools and school vouchers, donating $50 million for scholarships to send low-income students to private schools. Last year, the family foundation supported 57 charter schools around the country and contributed to pro-voucher organizations like the Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation and the Florida Education Reform Initiative of the Manhattan Institute, City Journal’s publisher.

The stores themselves still reflect Sam Walton’s values, and draw fire for it. In light of its vast market power, Wal-Mart has infuriated the media with its long-standing refusal to stock obscene CDs and racy magazines. BusinessWeek branded the company a cultural gatekeeper that has “served to narrow the mainstream for entertainment offerings while imparting to it a rightward tilt.â€쳌 Playboy magazine, which Wal-Mart has refused to sell, was more blunt in its recent, lengthy anti-Wal-Mart diatribe, which called Bentonville “the epicenter of retailing’s Evil Empire.â€쳌 So striking have the attacks been that a Kansas City business columnist recently suggested that the national press is “angry that average Americans don’t share their perceptions of Wal-Mart as the bad guysâ€쳌 and that Wal-Mart “has come to represent the defining cultural divide between the elites and the common folk.â€쳌 In other words, the press doesn’t like the fact that most Americans share the company’s values.

Not surprisingly, the press attacks downplay Wal-Mart’s many virtues: that it has never been accused of funny accounting; that it doesn’t load its executives with exorbitant salaries or perks; and that despite its market power, it doesn’t charge vendors “slottingâ€쳌 feesâ€"which are little more than bribes to stock their goods. By contrast with journalists, U.S. executives voted Wal-Mart America’s most admired company in Fortune magazine’s annual survey last year. Manufacturers, meanwhile, ranked Wal-Mart the best retailer to do business with, according to an annual survey by Cannondale Associates, while nearly three in ten shoppers surveyed by the WSL Strategic Retail consulting firm voted Wal-Mart their favorite store, a higher percentage of praise than any other retailer won.

But acclaim from the marketplace or from common folk may not protect a company when elite opinion turns against it, influencing legislators, regulators, and the courts. Wal-Mart has now become a tempting target. “We’ve seen many of our opponents come after us governmentally and in the media, where they see us as most vulnerable,â€쳌 said Jay Allen, the company’s senior vice president of corporate affairs, recently. This fall, for instance, Wal-Mart made national headlines when federal agents raided independent contractors using illegal aliens to clean the company’s stores. Government sources claim Wal-Mart knew of the illegals, but the retailer says it was cooperating in a three-year government investigation and was shocked when agents ignored the deal and swooped into its stores, creating a “media frenzy,â€쳌 in the words of Wal-Mart’s spokesperson. Moreover, Wal-Mart points out that, like other companies, it has been caught in the middle of conflicting government policies. Several years ago, the INS fined the company for violating the privacy of some workers when it tried to find out if they were illegal aliens.

Encouraged by the press criticism, entrepreneurial trial lawyers, eyeing Wal-Mart’s deep pockets with glee, have made it perhaps the biggest private-sector target of the nation’s plaintiffs’ bar. In just ten years, the number of pending lawsuits against Wal-Mart has increased fourfold, to 8,000, and the company has tripled the size of its litigation department. A Tennessee trial lawyer has even created a service called the Wal-Mart Litigation Project, which, for a fee, provides information to attorneys who want to sue Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart faces a growing number of potentially costly class action lawsuits, exemplified by a sex-discrimination suit brought by the Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll firm, notorious for getting Texaco to pay $176 million to black employees in a discrimination suit. That suit hinged on secretly recorded meetings in which managers reportedly made racial slursâ€"though subsequent audio enhancement of the tapes showed that the managers had uttered no such slurs and that the transcripts furnished by Cohen, Milstein to the New York Times had inaccurately represented the conversations.

So far, Cohen, Milstein has made no such “explosiveâ€쳌 revelations in the Wal-Mart case, but to read over the lawsuit is to gain a depressing lesson in the state of employment class action lawsuits. The suit is a collection of anecdotes of individual female employeesâ€"many of whom received poor evaluations and were turned down for promotionâ€"who now claim that Wal-Mart managers have frustrated their career ambitions. Of the first two plaintiffs who claim that Wal-Mart passed them over for promotions because they were female, one was disciplined for admittedly returning late from lunch breaks, and the other was suspended for improper handling of a customer refund. A few other cases involve accusations of supervisors making discriminatory remarks toward female employeesâ€"entirely possible in a company with more than 1 million employees, but hardly amounting to a company-wide pattern of discrimination. Still, the lawyers claim a plaintiff’s class of 700,000 current and former Wal-Mart female employees, and they argue that Wal-Mart has a long history of hostility toward women in management, starting when Sam Walton would take his executives quail hunting, which the suit avers “made women feel uncomfortable.â€쳌

To rein in Wal-Mart, the Left will have to keep up its assault in the courts, the statehouses, and the media, because it can’t win the battle for the hearts and minds of consumers. In a recent report on shopping patterns, WSL Strategic Retail said that Wal-Mart has succeeded like no other company in understanding what consumers want and giving it to them. Despite Wal-Mart’s years of success, the report predicted, the future looks even more favorable for the company and others that operate with its low-price, big-store philosophy.

To succeed against Wal-Mart, then, the Left will have to fight to deny the vast majority of Americans what they want. Every battle it wins in that war will cost the American consumer plenty.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_2_what_does_the_war.html