Wal-Mart Flunks Diversity Test
Today’s New York Times has this interesting article — Wal-Mart Finds That Its Formula Doesn’t Fit Every Culture. Seems as if the giant retailer hasn’t been listening to its legal department. As regular readers of this blog know, the legal department of the giant retailer has been pushing hard on law firms to diversify the ranks of their attorneys. As advertised, it’s all for the sake of doing the right thing. From a practical standpoint, it’s something else.
The article says nothing of law firm diversity or of the world’s largest class-action lawsuit. It’s all about Wal-Mart’s failure to realize that shoppers in Korea and Japan aren’t from the Midwest. They don’t have lots of space to haul and store huge amounts of cheap shampoo, and they can’t reach items on shelves that were designed for big, tall Yanks.
The article begins by noting the giant’s decision to abandon Germany, where it has 85 stores with $2.5 billion in annual sales. After a decade of trying, the giant’s decided it can’t compete with German retailers on German soil. And the reason it can’t is because it never occurred to Wal-Mart that Germany isn’t just a smaller version of U.S.
Case in point. The giant told its cashiers to smile at customers, but the customers (most of whom aren’t from the Midwest) took the imported custom the wrong way. The giant told its workers to start the day by acting like they were Japanese workers in Japan, but early morning chanting struck German workers in Germany as a very strange thing to do.
Wal-Mart might have known better, had it done its share of due diligence. But instead of getting Germans to set up shop in Germany, it got some Yankees unfamiliar with Germany “to impose Wal-Mart’s corporate culture on non-American employees.”
Which somehow brings us back to the giant’s giant battle with its lowly employees. I’ve been thinking all along that the reason Wal-Mart is aggressively pushing diversity on law firms is so it’ll look good in court. Instead of its lead counsel being someone whose last name is Winthrop III wearing a Brooks Brothers suit trying to defend it against common folk, I imagined it was hoping for a pool of lawyers named Hernandez and Jefferson to wear Dockers to court to impress the jury.
But now I’m wondering . . . might Wal-Mart really be looking to start a chain of discount law firms? Is that the real motive for its law firm diversity initiatives, the real reason it’s making so many donations to organizations it never used to give donations to? Could it really be this — the retail giant hopes to become the H & R Block of the legal industry?
I think that makes much better sense than believing the giant just woke up one morning and decided to put principles above profits.