Surrounded By Wal-Martians

The British press is notoriously opinionated. (Yes, even more so than the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal.) In the old country, journalism is more of a mixture of entertainment and information than it is in the United States.

So we couldn’t help laughing a bit when we read Dominic Rushe’s story about Wal-Mart’s annual shareholders meeting in the June 10 issue of The Sunday Times of London. The meeting was held June 1 in Fayetteville.

Under the gigantic headline “Wal-Martians,” The Sunday Times published a photograph of CEO Lee Scott surrounded by what appeared to be waist-high aliens. A graphic designer had obviously plopped an image of Scott into a sea of martians with pointed ears and small, knobby antenna sprouting from their moonlike heads.

“Wal-Mart wants to make Wal-Martians of us all,” the story states.

Rushe refers to the old guard at Wal-Mart as the “fundamentalist Sons of Sam” (Sam Walton, of course) and Bentonville as “a rural backwater.”

He writes that Scott looks a little like J.R. Ewing from the television show “Dallas” and gesticulates “like a Bible-belt preacher.”

Referring to Sam Walton, who died in 1992, Rushe wrote that “visiting moguls were picked up in his battered old pickup truck to sit in a cab that reeked of his beloved dogs.”

Some of us remember “Mr. Sam’s” pickup truck, so we know it wasn’t really “battered,” at least not by Arkansas standards. We also know the Brits take a few liberties with their reportage, so we just kicked back and enjoyed traveling to another planet for a minute.

We hear the Wal-Mart folks, however, weren’t pleased with the E.T. comparison by a newspaper with a circulation of 1.4 million in the United Kingdom.