POLISHING WAL-MART’S IMAGE

Wal-Mart is the world’s largest retailer, but it has big challenges, too. Critics accuse it of underpaying its employees, skimping on health benefits, neglecting safety measures and forcing neighboring stores out of business. Townspeople – in Waldoboro and Damariscotta, for example – have petitioned to keep Wal-Mart and other big-box stores out of their communities.

Until recently, the company has seemed to brush aside such complaints. But it now has embarked on what looks like a charm campaign. After publicly improving health benefits for its employees, it now has announced a plan to build 50 stores in the next two years in neighborhoods with high crime or unemployment rates. Each new store, starting with one on Chicago’s West Side, will anchor a “Wal-Mart Jobs and Opportunity Zone.”

The idea is to engage local businesses and organizations to create jobs and economic development in areas that greatly need them. Part of the deal would be for the Wal-Mart store to provide free in-house promotions for nearby businesses – the very stores that normally would feel threatened by the arrival of a new big-box store.

Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott describes the venture as “a commitment to reach beyond our stores, to further engage the community and offer an even greater economic boost to people and neighborhoods that need Wal-Mart the most.”

How the local businesses will react remains an open question. If one of the new stores was to open in central Maine, some existing businesses wouldn’t want anything to do with it. That is the attitude of Bill Miller, whose Miller Drug in Bangor has felt the pinch of Wal-Mart’s claim of selling everything for less than its competitors. Mr. Miller says the Wal-Mart plan is “too little, too late.”

Bob Reny, who operates the Reny’s chain of discount stores, also expresses skepticism. “Can you imagine walking into Wal-Mart’s and hearing an ad for Reny’s? It sounds like sending a hen into the fox’s den to see if it looks safe.”

Similarly, some bankers are suspicious of Wal-Mart’s current application to enter the banking business. The company insists that it simply wants to process its own credit- and debit-card and electronic-check transactions and has no plans to begin branch banking or compete with community banks.

Still, some consumer advocates think that consumers would benefit if Wal-Mart competed with banks and check-cashing shops and especially the cash-until-payday lenders with their outrageous interest rates.

Wal-Mart has its defenders, who say it reduces cost to consumers and rep-resents the future of retailing. And whether it wins over its detractors, tens of millions of people have already decided they think the big box is pretty charming already.