File Under: WTFAwesome

We all love hating Wal-Mart. At the same time we all have friends and family who shop there regularly. We tell them they’re ‘ruining the world,’ and when they ask us to elaborate, our explanations are slightly unorganized and convoluted. This is all part of the American experience, and we can handle it because we understand big business tactics. We tolerate it because we’ve seen it before, we know what to do with it, it makes sense.

Or it did, before a New York Times article on Monday said the following about Wal-Mart’s recently launched Check Out blog:

Known for its strict, by-the-books culture — accepting a cup of coffee from a supplier can be a firing offense — Wal-Mart is now encouraging its merchants to speak frankly, even critically, about the products the chain carries.

This unusual new Web site, which was quietly created during the holiday shopping season, has become a forum for unvarnished rants about gadgets, raves about new video games and advice on selecting environmentally sustainable food.

Corporate blogs are nothing new — General Motors, Dell and Boeing have them — but Wal-Mart’s site, called Check Out (checkoutblog.com), turns the traditional model on its head. Instead of relying on polished high-level executives, it is written by little-known buyers, largely without editing.

The result is an intensely personal window into the lives, preferences and quirks of the powerful tastemakers at Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, who have spent years shielded from public view.

Their decisions about what makes it onto Wal-Mart’s shelves have enormous impact, earning (or costing) vendors millions of dollars.

Keep in mind this is the same Wal-Mart that, as the largest music retailer in the world, has a reputation for stubbornly sticking to carrying only censored top 40 material. Are you frustrated and confused? I’m frustrated and confused. Sure this is just good business practice, but it’s so…progressive for a business that’s been historically old-school. How am I supposed to react when Wal-Mart does something I like? I can ignore all the charity — that just comes back thru taxes — but this, this is too positive and up my alley to ignore.

It was a blogger on the Check Out, after all, who first disclosed last month that Wal-Mart would stock only high-definition DVDs and players using the Blu-ray format, rather than the rival HD DVD system. The decision was considered the death knell for HD DVD.

Ah the future. Hello.

This is not Wal-Mart’s first plunge into the blogosphere. Several years ago, when the retailer’s public relations problems began to mount, it turned to the Web for relief. It created one blog, Working Families for Wal-Mart, to trumpet the chain’s accomplishments and ding its critics. It created another, Wal-Marting Across America, to highlight the good deeds and productive careers of Wal-Mart employees.

Critics dismissed both as thinly veiled extensions of Wal-Mart’s P.R. department, and Wal-Mart shut them down.

The lesson seemed clear: create an authentic blog or don’t create a blog at all.

Wal-Mart employees began developing Check Out (subtitled “Where the Lanes Are All Open”) a year ago and recruited a handful of buyer-bloggers last fall, giving them rudimentary training on how to post their writing, upload videos and create hyperlinks.

After heeding the lessons of Wal-Mart’s earlier blogs and consulting with several well-known bloggers from sites like the Huffington Post, the buyers decided the site would succeed only if they wrote in their own voice, free from censorship and corporate review.

There are several notable and amazing things happening here. The first is the failure of the PR blogs, which serves up a point about the new media marketplace in general; communication isn’t one way any longer and ham-fisted marketing has to be creative to succeed, not just there. Businesses are having to answer increasingly to public opinion and scrutiny, and well funded ad-campaigns for crap products no longer offer the near guaranteed success they used to. People want respect and their own opinion. The second, and most incredible part of all this, is that Wal-Mart understood and bought into these truths.

We live in a world where most businesses erroneously think that with enough money they can tell us what to buy, what to do. They haven’t accepted that the public now has voice enough to demand quality products, and to sink those that aren’t. And who is it that’s stepped up to embrace this reality? It’s definitely not the music industry, they’re too busy pushing that music piracy is a gate-way to drugs, murder, and terrorism. It’s not the movies, they’re too focused on piggybackcloning the legalized assault music is making. It’s not some hot new entrepreneurial enterprise or corporation with a history of innovative thinking. No, it’s retail megamonster Wal-Mart, one of the only businesses around to still hold that type of big stick power and influence, that makes the move to give the customer control.

WTF? And yet — Awesome.

Original NYTimes article: Link