Wal-Mart Competition

Wal-Mart critics take cause to church

By Jim Hopkins, USA TODAY

Wal-Mart's critics, opening a new front in their war on the retail goliath, are borrowing from actor-director Mel Gibson's promotional playbook.  

Producers of a new documentary, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, will show it at about 1,000 churches, synagogues and religious sites nationwide on Nov. 13 in a bid to force changes in Wal-Mart's employment and other practices.  

The film, by the director of Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, comes as Wal-Mart mounts a new effort to polish its battered image. The movie is part of a broader campaign by a disparate group of critics who now include ministers asserting Wal-Mart's tactics are a moral as well as economic issue.

Producer Robert Greenwald hopes for the same success Gibson had last year building grass-roots support through churches for his blockbuster, The Passion of the Christ.

Others, such as producers of Left Behind: World at War, also are seeking promotional help from churches. That film, starring Lou Gossett Jr., about those left on Earth after the biblical rapture, was shown last weekend in 3,200 churches.

The Wal-Mart film features interviews with company employees, small-business owners, teachers and others who sharply criticize it with charges of low wages, skimpy health benefits and a poor environmental record.

"Those are moral questions," Greenwald said Wednesday. "They're questions of who we are as people, who we are as a country."

Consumers may be receptive. Moral values ranked No. 4 among top non-economic worries in a Gallup Poll this month.

Wal-Mart has not seen the film, says spokeswoman Christi Gallagher. But, she said, "His video is simply unabashed propaganda."

Still, the retailer is promoting a competing documentary, Why Wal-Mart Works: And Why That Makes Some People C-r-a-z-y, about working families who benefit from the company. Brothers Ron and Robert Galloway financed the $85,000 film, with Wal-Mart's limited cooperation. It is due out Nov. 15 on DVD at major retailers.

Greenwald's Brave New Films estimates 40,000 people will view their film in churches and other religious venues after its limited theatrical release next week in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Screenings are scheduled the following week at colleges.

Greenwald, 62, made the film for $1.8 million, more than four times the cost of Outfoxed, which attacked the Fox News empire. The new film was financed by private investors who, he says, did not include organized labor.

For information about Wal-Mart Competition go to: www.michaelbergdahl.net

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