Wal-Martians Orbiting UA

We hear a group of Wal-Mart employees couldn’t get a meeting room in the University of Arkansas’ Kimpel Hall during this year’s shareholders meeting week because they group trashed the room and stopped up toilets in the building last year.

The group was told they might want to check with the Sam Walton College of Business next door because that’s the college the Walton family gave $50 million to, prompting the UA to name it for the founder of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

“I was overjoyed that they weren’t going to be around,” said an office manager on the first floor of Kimpel. “It was awful [last year].”

The office manager said the Wal-Mart associates kept going to “poor” academic offices in the building and asking for pens and tape. This year, she was prepared to direct the “associates” to the Wal-Mart Supercenter on Sixth Street if they needed supplies.

Lisa Summerford, assistant dean for the UA’s Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, said they joked around the office about referring the group to the Walton College, “but we probably would have accommodated them if we hadn’t been short on classroom space.

“We just really didn’t have the space,” she said, “and we’ve had problems in the past, so we weren’t real excited about it.”