Not your grandpa's Wal-Mart!

Yes, Wal-Mart is huge.  How huge?  consider this:

Wal-Mart has more than 10,000 suppliers in China. In addition, about a million farmers supply produce to the company's 281 stores in China. If Wal-Mart were a sovereign nation, it would be China's fifth- or sixth-largest export market.

That huge!
The old story was about Wal-Mart the evil giant.  But, as I noted recently, the market-savvy Wal-Mart is transforming in ways that might surprise those confined by their ideological blinders.  Wal-Mart is flexing its muscles to promote a green thinking among its suppliers:

"We heard that in the future, to become a Wal-Mart supplier, you have to be an environmentally friendly company," Fung said. "So we switched some of our products and the way we produced them."

And there is more:

"For those who may still be on the sidelines, I want to be direct," Wal-Mart chief executive Lee Scott said sternly. "Meeting social and environmental standards is not optional. I firmly believe that a company that cheats on overtime and on the age of its labor, that dumps its scraps and its chemicals in our rivers, that does not pay its taxes or honor its contracts will ultimately cheat on the quality of its products. And cheating on the quality of products is the same as cheating on customers. We will not tolerate that at Wal-Mart."
Now new suppliers are screened for environmental practices.

And for those worried that the Chinese government does not seem to care about the environmental impacts of its economic growth strategies?  Here is the killer:

Many China experts say Wal-Mart's guidelines could be more important than the government's.
"They are the rule setters," said Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Beijing-based group. "Before Wal-Mart only cared about price and quality, so that encouraged companies to race to the bottom on environmental standards. They could lose contracts because competition was so fierce on price."
Wal-Mart's suppliers have been forced to get serious about pollution, Ma said. "Wal-Mart says if you're over the compliance level, you're out of business. That will send a powerful signal."