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| Wal-Mart to the rescue! |
| 2008-03-28 |
| Colby Cosh, National Post Shortly before Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, the chief executive officer of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott, gathered his subordinates and ordered a memorandum sent to every single regional and store manager in the imperiled area. His words were not especially exalted, but they ought to be mounted and framed on the wall of every chain retailer -- and remembered as American business's answer to the pre-battle oratory of George S. Patton or Henry V. "A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level," was Scott's message to his people. "Make the best decision that you can with the information that's available to you at the time, and above all, do the right thing." This extraordinary delegation of authority -- essentially promising unlimited support for the decision-making of employees who were earning, in many cases, less than $100,000 a year -- saved countless lives in the ensuing chaos. The results are recounted in a new paper on the disaster written by Steven Horwitz, an Austrian-school economist at St. Lawrence University in New York. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency fumbled about, doing almost as much to prevent essential supplies from reaching Louisiana and Mississippi as it could to facilitate it, Wal-Mart managers performed feats of heroism. In Kenner, La., an employee crashed a forklift through a warehouse door to get water for a nursing home. A Marrero, La., store served as a barracks for cops whose homes had been submerged. In Waveland, Miss., an assistant manager who could not reach her superiors had a bulldozer driven through the store to retrieve disaster necessities for community use, and broke into a locked pharmacy closet to obtain medicine for the local hospital. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart trucks pre-loaded with emergency supplies at regional depots were among the first on the scene wherever refugees were being gathered by officialdom. Their main challenge, in many cases, was running a gauntlet of FEMA officials who didn't want to let them through. As the president of the brutalized Jefferson Parish put it in a Sept. 4 Meet the Press interview, speaking at the height of nationwide despair over FEMA's confused response: "If [the U.S.] government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn't be in this crisis." This benevolent improvisation contradicts everything we have been taught about Wal-Mart by labour unions and the "small-is-beautiful" left. . . . |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #10 We |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2008-03-28 23:34 |
| #9 Let's fire our elected officials and gov't agency bureaucrats and contract the running of the country to WalMart! |
| Posted by: Ebbaimble the Younger8797 2008-03-28 22:41 |
| #8 We had a flood last summer that flooded 1/4 of my town. I started sandbagging at 6am that morning. The WalMart trucks arrived by 10am. Say what you will sinse, they were there with us before anyone else. |
| Posted by: whitecollar redneck 2008-03-28 20:40 |
| #7 The story about WalMart's performance during Katrina was available at the time, but were buried by the MSM which had other axes to grind. The USCG was never given proper recognition for its actions, some type of presidential citation would have been in order. At least Gov. "Stuck on Stupid" Blanco is out of office. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2008-03-28 19:21 |
| #6 sinse, I don't like the Wal-Mart plicy of buying almost exclusively from China (thankf Her Thighness for that) but they do support the communities where they do business. It's good business sense. They provide the Mounted Search and Rescue Unit I belong to with equipment , water, foods we can carry for several days, and fuel for lanterns and cook-stoves. Wal-Mart is not the Monster depicted in the MSM. They do fight Unions but they do offer employees decent wages and health care. |
| Posted by: Deacon Blues 2008-03-28 19:06 |
| #5 Sinse, I doubt you'd notice a difference if you did. |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2008-03-28 18:50 |
| #4 oh what fuckin bullshit. these where normal ppl doing what was right not wal mart corp doiong what they thought best. i bet the rreal word from above was shoot if there is looting. Next let's put up a billboard saying wal mart saved ketarina victims.Personnaly I am sick of hearing about how Bush fucked it up maybe they should have gottne their lazy asses out of harms way except the ones that couldn't. For the ones that could and stayed and are now bitching shoot them in the head |
| Posted by: sinse 2008-03-28 18:32 |
| #3 On the funnier side, after a hurricane in Florida and with another expected, Wal-Mart turned to its formidable database, the largest in the world, to determine the most important emergency supplies of people prior to hurricanes, so they could be certain of having enough of it available in those regions expected to be hardest hit. Of all the supplies people stocked up on prior to a major hurricane, such as generators, boards and nails, batteries and flashlights, the database was clear that above all else, the public needed vast amounts of two things to prepare for a hurricane, eclipsing everything else by a wide margin: Beer and Strawberry Pop-Tarts. Nothing else came even close. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-03-28 16:43 |
| #2 FEMA of course has to follow the law, particularly in the handling of appropriated funds. Now if Bush had been willing to weather the criticism and issued a blanket pardon on 'errors' but not outright intentional criminal theft of funds to start with, a lot less CYA would've been avoided. The critics don't care. If he loosens the paperwork you get a degree of fraud and loss of accountability. Complain, complain, complain. If you maintain accountability you're slow in dealing with the paper work and parsing out the relief money. Complain, complain, complain. Of course it doesn't help that FEMA is the new patronage department, for both parties. It used to be a DoD responsibility, but in the gutting of the services in the post-Vietnam period, the military was happy to get another unfunded, unresourced mission out of the door. Of course as Katrina demonstrated, the one part of the government that did function reasonably well was the uniformed services. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2008-03-28 13:45 |
| #1 As the president of the brutalized Jefferson Parish put it in a Sept. 4 Meet the Press interview, speaking at the height of nationwide despair over FEMA's confused response: "If [the U.S.] government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn't be in this crisis." Oh, Queen Hillary would not like to hear that truth about government. I mean, government is the best form of social support. /sarcasm |
| Posted by: www 2008-03-28 12:57 |