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This kind of practical morality operates on a larger scale too. Take the sale of alcoholic beverages. Wal-Mart does not sell beer and wine in its traditional discount stores. Yet if you walk into many Wal-Mart supercenters, stores as big as 220,000 sq. ft. that combine a supermarket with a traditional Wal-Mart, you'll find plenty of Budweiser to put in the coolers being sold in sporting goods. Wine and beer are also sold in Sam's Clubs and in the company's new chain of downsized Neighborhood Markets, a.k.a. "small marts...
...distinction? Wal-Mart executives attribute the decision to the customers, who say they expect to be able to buy beer and wine in supercenters just as they do at competitors' stores of a similar type. Yet booze will remain verboten in fuddy-duddy old Wal-Mart discount stores. Explains Glass: "What's the difference between selling in a supercenter and a Wal-Mart? I can't tell you I can give you a definite answer. But I can tell you that I have a rationale for it." Nevertheless, within the company and without, there was muttering that Sam--Wal-Mart...
Hence, Wal-Mart is well stocked in inconsistencies. South Park, the cartoon television series and recent movie, features a funny but foulmouthed cast of characters and an infinite collection of toilet jokes. The South Park video game got to the shelves but not the film. Reason: Wal-Mart's game buyer figured that customers who purchase it are already familiar with the characters. The video buyer, on the other hand, believed that customers associate animated films with movies such as Bambi and not with Cartman and his profane pals. (No doubt the boys would have joyously killed and consumed Bambi...
...Mart's world, there is accounting for taste. For instance, the video section stocks the risque comedy There's Something About Mary. And there's something in it that more than a few folks would find objectionable. Says movie buyer Eddie Tutt: "It's pretty crude, but [the movie] did $175 million in sales, which kind of tells you that most of the public looked at it and probably felt good about it." Which tells Tutt that unlike, say, Howard Stern's crude movie, Private Parts, which Wal-Mart did not carry, Mary will light up the cash registers...
...Mart customers are not of one mind on some of society's more complicated matters, as it learned with Preven. The primary ingredient in Preven is ethinyl estradiol/levonorgestrel--the same as in birth control pills--given in a high dose. The package also contains a pregnancy test. Although Wal-Mart wouldn't stock Preven, it has always sold birth control pills...