Wal-Mart is Going Green

There is an excellent feature in Fortune Magazine ("The Green Machine," 7/27/06) about Wal-Mart and the changes that the company has been through with regard to it's CSR attitude and actions. This company fascinates me. It's such an incongruous mixture of good and bad influences on our society and on our planet - but it's hard to say whether they balance out, since every impact is so huge.

As many people have pointed out, if Wal-Mart makes a move to stock organic foods, it will reshape the organics industry - possibly making organic food available to the masses at reasonable prices, and making organic growing proceedures a much more common standard around the world. If it asks suppliers to reduce waste, those changes will trickle down through the rest of the economy.

On the other hand, Wal-Mart operates on an unprecedented scale. The company is huge, its stores are huge, and its impact on our lives is huge. Many of the objections to Wal-Mart are intrinisic to its success, whether it attains that success ecologically and humanely or not. New stores still displace "inefficient" but beloved Mom-and-Pop stores, they still lead to the homogenization of our consumerist society, and they still encourage us to buy more and more stuff that we probably don't need.

I want to reward Wal-Mart for the progress it's making, but at the same time I'm not sure if I want to see it succeed under any circumstances. I decided almost a year ago that I would no longer "refuse" to shop at Wal-Mart on ethical grounds, but I'm not sure if I'll ever be a huge fan.

For me, the decision of whether I should shop at Wal-Mart is almost purely theoretical - I live in Boston, and the nearest Wal-Mart is about 20 miles away. Most of the country lives much closer to one. I'm curious, has Boston resisted the company, or are we a poor market for it due to our staunchly independent/individualistic values?