Wal-Mart meeting wows workers
Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Let the show begin.
The annual pep rally, entertainment extravaganza and business gathering — otherwise known as the Wal-Mart Stores Inc. shareholders meeting week — is under way.
Employees from around the globe began pouring into Northwest Arkansas, home to the world’s largest retailer, over Memorial Day weekend.
On Tuesday they toured the Bentonville town square and the Wal-Mart Visitors Center, once the Walton 5 & 10 where founder Sam Walton started the company that now stands atop the Fortune 500 list of the world’s largest companies. The visitors also went to the nearby Sam’s Club in Bentonville and a Wal-Mart store in Rogers.
By week’s end the employees, other shareholders and guests will have been treated to shows ranging from the classic-rock group The Eagles to the Latin rap band Wisin Y Yandel.
The company plans to conduct some business Friday, attempting to ward off uninvited shareholder proposals and appease shareholders unhappy with the lethargic performance of the company’s stock the past several years.
“Wal-Mart’s had, in some respects, a bad year, and allowing shareholders to ask questions is a good thing,” said Patricia Edwards, a fund manager with Wentworth, Hauser & Violich, Investment Counselors, in Seattle.
Bentonville-based Wal-Mart’s organized opposition groups, Wal-Mart Watch and WakeUp-Walmart. com, say they have new initiatives to unveil this week but declined to elaborate.
“This is a very trying time for the company, and unfortunately they have no one to blame but themselves,” said Chris Kofinis, spokesman for WakeUpWalmart. com.
On Tuesday morning busloads of Wal-Mart International employees snapped photos as they arrived at the destination of the shareholders pilgrimage, the Wal-Mart Visitors Center in downtown Bentonville.
About 30 employees from Wal-Mart’s Puerto Rico operations chanting a company cheer accompanied by tambourines and maracas left the museum.
Blanca Rodriguez, an information-systems coordinator for the Puerto Rico home office, said she was happily returning to the United States for her second shareholders’ meeting. She attended her first gathering in 2004.
“We love Wal-Mart, and we are so happy to be here. We are having fun,” Rodriguez said as the group returned to the bus for the next leg of the tour, the Sam’s Club warehouse on Southeast 14 th Street.
Osiris Ruiz, chief of replenishment for a distribution center in Nicaragua, said about 25 employees from that country had made the trip to Bentonville as part of a much larger Central American Wal-Mart division.
Adulfo Lugo, who works in real estate and construction for Wal-Mart, said the Central American group numbered about 150.
Nicaraguan Roger Manitica, who works in merchandising, said the group first toured the Wal-Mart Supercenter at Pleasant Crossing in south Rogers before traveling to the Bentonville museum.
He noticed a lot of merchandise at the store differed from what he is accustomed to seeing.
“There are a lot of really great deals. A lot of our group did some shopping while they were there,” he said.
On Tuesday night R&B singer and dancer Chris Brown and alternative rock band Fall Out Boy played at Bud Walton Arena in a concert open to the public.
Tonight The Eagles will play at Bud Walton Arena, closed to the public.
Kool and the Gang and Hall and Oates will perform Thursday night in a parking-lot concert to begin at 6: 30 p.m. at Razorback and Sixth in Fayetteville. Gates open at 5: 45 p.m. for Wal-Mart employees and guests and at 6 p.m. for the public.
Thursday night, Latin rap band Wisin Y Yandel and Mexican pop group RBD perform at 7: 45 p.m. at Barnhhill Arena in a concert closed to the public.
Earlier this month Wal-Mart reported record sales and profits for its first quarter but cautioned that the second quarter may disappoint Wall Street.
Many retail analysts remained unimpressed, especially those urging the company to rein in its store-expansion rate.
“We believe investors would applaud the decision to slow square-footage growth to focus on existing units and plow back excess cash flow into stock buyback programs,” Adrianne Shapira, an analyst with Goldman Sachs & Co., wrote in a research report.
Others, such as John Lawrence, an analyst with Morgan Keegan & Co., think the company is on track to improve year-overyear sales in stores open at least a year, a key retail measure that investors watch. Wal-Mart is in the midst of remodeling hundreds of stores, a process blamed in part for sluggish sales growth.
“The key to share price appreciation remains the company’s ability to stabilize sales, in our opinion,” he wrote in a report after the first-quarter earnings report.
Besides the barrage of criticism from its union-funded critics, Wal-Mart is in a highly publicized legal dispute with its former marketing communications director, Julie Roehm, who orchestrated last year’s annual meeting.
Wal-Mart fired Roehm and the advertising agency she hired late last year. The company later claimed in an answer to Roehm’s wrongful-termination lawsuit that she violated company policy by having a sexual relationship with a subordinate and by seeking employment with the advertising agency she recommended.
Roehm countered last week with a claim that Chief Executive Officer H. Lee Scott received an inappropriate discount on a yacht in violation of company policy, and that her former boss at Wal-Mart, John Fleming, accepted from vendors free tickets, backstage passes and souvenirs at an Eagles concert in Spain.
Wal-Mart also continues to battle a sex-discrimination lawsuit that could affect as many as 2 million current and former employees. In February a threejudge panel of the 9 th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a federal judge’s certification of the lawsuit as a class action.
Wal-Mart is seeking rehearing of the issue by a larger panel.
A Goldman Sachs analysis put potential actual damages at $ 1. 5 billion to $ 3. 5 billion if Wal-Mart loses and punitive damages at $ 13. 5 billion to $ 31. 5 billion.
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