The Washington Post reports Wal-Mart is expected to become the world’s largest company when Fortune Magazine unveils its next Fortune 500 in April:

…Wal-Mart’s
incredible success can be attributed to the business philosophy (Sam)
Walton swore by and which is still in practice a decade after his
death: “Try to squeeze the lowest price possible from the people who
sell to you, and then pass the savings on to the customer,” explained
Kurt Barnard, a longtime retail consultant.

I’m
not a Wal-Mart shopper. (However, I do recommend their fried chicken
for the next time you have a picnic or tailgate party and they’ve got
good prices on DVDs, but I wouldn’t know anything else because I don’t
shop there. Much. Okay, okay. I don’t shop there unless I can’t find
what I need at Sam’s.)

Despite my desire to support Main
Street merchants and local grocers, Wal-Mart has done more to bury
small retailers than any force in history. Sam Walton admits as much in
his autobiography
(written a decade ago by John Huey), but also presents suggestions on
ways small merchants can compete. The ironic thing is that small
business owners, due to our parsimony I presume, are the primary
customer-base of Wal-Mart’s “buyers club” unit, Sam’s Club. For
example, the restaurant in our office building uses Sam’s as its
supplier for condiments, paper-goods and god-knows what else.

In self-defense, Wal-Mart touts its support of local communities and
use of small business suppliers. I’m sure there are many, many examples
of businesses which have grown due to their distribution through the
Wal-Mart channel. But the whispered chat about supplying Wal-Mart
usually revolves around the difficulty of working with them, even for
the largest of suppliers.

But Wal-Mart is an amazing success
story. I marvel everytime I enter one of their super stores. I am
awe-struck when making my quarterly pilgrimage to Sam’s. The spectrum
of branded products priced aggressively means American consumers in
even the smallest of towns can find amazing bargains.

So I’m
torn. Wal-Mart has played a key role in the demise of many small town
Main Streets and the businesses along them. But then, Sam Walton
started out on one of those small town squares, himself. And 40 years
after opening his first Wal-Mart, his small business is the world’s
largest business. Number one on the world Fortune 500. I don’t know if
this news makes me happy or sad, but I do know it makes me hungry for
some fried chicken.

The Washington Post reports Wal-Mart is expected to become the world’s largest company when Fortune Magazine unveils its next Fortune 500 in April:

…Wal-Mart’s incredible success can be attributed to the business philosophy (Sam) Walton swore by and which is still in practice a decade after his death: “Try to squeeze the lowest price possible from the people who sell to you, and then pass the savings on to the customer,” explained Kurt Barnard, a longtime retail consultant.

I’m not a Wal-Mart shopper. (However, I do recommend their fried chicken for the next time you have a picnic or tailgate party and they’ve got good prices on DVDs, but I wouldn’t know anything else because I don’t shop there. Much. Okay, okay. I don’t shop there unless I can’t find what I need at Sam’s.)

Despite my desire to support Main Street merchants and local grocers, Wal-Mart has done more to bury small retailers than any force in history. Sam Walton admits as much in
his autobiography (written a decade ago by John Huey), but also presents suggestions on ways small merchants can compete. The ironic thing is that small business owners, due to our parsimony I presume, are the primary customer-base of Wal-Mart’s “buyers club” unit, Sam’s Club. For example, the restaurant in our office building uses Sam’s as its supplier for condiments, paper-goods and god-knows what else.

In self-defense, Wal-Mart touts its support of local communities and use of small business suppliers. I’m sure there are many, many examples of businesses which have grown due to their distribution through the Wal-Mart channel. But the whispered chat about supplying Wal-Mart usually revolves around the difficulty of working with them, even for the largest of suppliers.

But Wal-Mart is an amazing success story. I marvel everytime I enter one of their super stores. I am awe-struck when making my quarterly pilgrimage to Sam’s. The spectrum of branded products priced aggressively means American consumers in even the smallest of towns can find amazing bargains.

So I’m torn. Wal-Mart has played a key role in the demise of many small town Main Streets and the businesses along them. But then, Sam Walton started out on one of those small town squares, himself. And 40 years after opening his first Wal-Mart, his small business is the world’s largest business. Number one on the world Fortune 500. I don’t know if this news makes me happy or sad, but I do know it makes me hungry for some fried chicken.

It’s (what, ironic? sad?) to think that a retirment plan promotional mug would be more valuable than the retirement plan itself.

Slate publisher Scott Moore on the future of online advertising?

Quote:

Gone are dozens of get-rich-quick schemes that had penciled in “advertising” as the means to IPO dreams. Now we can see past the wreckage and assess how the Web will continue to grow as a business.

Was she asking for it, or what? New York pundits are having a feast on her failure. And these are some nice ones.

From “Failure is Hot!” by Michael Wolffe, NY Magazine

In fact, it was not hard to see that one of the key problems of Talk was Tina herself. In a logical enterprise and a rational universe, she would have been fired (as a succession of editors acting in her stead were replaced). Except that she was the only reason for the magazine’s existence. Who would have wanted the magazine without her? She was the value proposition. All the goodwill was bound up in her. She was the asset — and she was rapidly depreciating.

From Newsday

“She’s a person of such energy, and such connections, you know that she’ll re-emerge somehow, somewhere.? He doubts she’d try another magazine. “I think that this experience might have soured most mortals.?

From the New York Observer

But Talk never quite became a magazine in the sense that Playboy or Sports Illustrated or Ladies Home Journal is a magazine you know and can come to terms with. After its initial kind of cool physical appearance as a stapled, sleek, oversized magazine in the tradition of English Sunday supplements and Hello! That suggested a raffish feature newsmagazine with a short lead-time, it returned to the usual lumbering American perfect-bound format, and then to indistinguishability.

Here’s a story that’s just right for me: an erstwhile triathlete, Y-member, Harry Potter reader who points to weird news. AP reports Penryn, Pa., police have voted to boycott the local YMCA’s triathlon next September. Why? Because the Y’s after-school reading program let kids read Harry Potter last fall, and we all know that Harry Potter promotes witchcraft, right?

Mossberg keeps touting Apple products, this time iPhoto:

There are scads of other consumer photo programs, mostly for Windows. But iPhoto is different. Most other photo software concentrates on helping you to edit your photos and then turn them into “projects,” like calendars and greeting cards. IPhoto concentrates on organizing your photos and then sharing them with others. There are some limited editing tools, but the emphasis is on managing and sharing a large collection of digital photos, not tweaking each one to perfection.

The current problem for me is that iPhoto runs only on 0S X and I’m still in the 9s. Oh yeah, that and I don’t have a digital camera.

The demise of Talk Magazine has provided many media and culture pundits with the opportunity to wax away on what’s wrong with a wide array of things today: magazine publishing, the British, Tina Brown (of course), Hollywood, liberals, buzz, even Bill Clinton. Here’s an example of the “why Tina toppled” genre from Andrew Sullivan:

Her largess almost killed off other magazines. As editor of The New Republic during Ms. Brown’s heyday, I watched as almost every single young writer I found was immediately offered small fortunes by Tina to decamp. She didn’t so much scout for talent as read other magazines and bribe it. She operated a magazine less as a home for likeminded writers and editors than as a Hollywood studio in which big names were signed up for vast sums, and often kept idle.

I think the demise of Talk Magazine has a simpler explanation. It’s that after spending $50 million, the magazine still didn’t know what it was about. To prove my point, visit their website’s “about us” page and you’ll see the “under construction” message at left.