Edelman Learns Fast - On The Ball for WalMart

Edelman and WalMart are filling the blogosphere with a buzzing sound again.  At least this time Edelman is pro-actively addressing the situation in a timely matter.  That's good to hear especially since WOMMA's put their membership on review.

Although Edelman's response time on this is much better than the flogging episode last month, the slow reaction of WalMart might be what hurts them the most this time.  In the middle of this past week - November 9th to be exact, a blog called Bent Corner posted about WalMart selling Nazi symbol t-shirts.  That post started getting a lot of traffic, and within a day Edelman was on the ball and emailed them regarding the t-shirts, saying they were going to be pulled from the stores.  Bent Corner followed up with a post, both posting Marshall Manson's reply, but also some investigation whether or not WalMart had truly pulled the t-shirts (they hadn't as of the blog's post yesterday 11/11/06).

I decided that since I had a trip to make to WalMart myself I'd check my local store out to see if the t-shirts had been pulled as well.  At first I could not find the little square poster with the t-shirt's main image on it.  If you go to this section, you'll know what I'm talking about.  There were a few "blank" containers, that contained scattered shirts.

Low and behold, there were these nazi t-shirts, all in one of those containers.  This wasn't like the other containers where it had bunches of mixed kind, these were all the same shirt in a container that was "blank". So for the sake of proof, I bought the t-shirt (which is now on its way back to the store to be returned) took a picture of the shirt and scanned in the receipt.  This store just took down the front cover display, the shirts were still there for purchase.

Edelman is clearly on the ball about this situation.  They are addressing and engaging the blogosphere, it's their client who is slow on the uptake this time.  Their client also has pretty piss poor understanding of how offense this shirt really is, and that it needs to be entirely removed from the shelves, not just the display announcing its presence removed.  Of course this is entirely me assuming that Edelman and WalMart truly want this issues to stop the blogosphere from buzzing again.

Kudos to Edelman on the monitoring and engaging.  Rotten eggs to WalMart till the t-shirts are totally removed.

*please note, any sort of racist or inappropriate comments will not be posted.  this blog post is to focus on Edelman's reaction to WalMart selling these t-shirts.