March New Releases

March 4th
101 Dalmatians 
Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium
Awake
Dr. Doolittle:  Tail to the Chief - what a cute Cavalier King Charles Spaniel
Into the Wild

March 11th
Hitman
No Country for Old Men - Best Picture - a must have for your collection
Dan in Real Life
Bee Movie - 3 PEZ dispensers included

August Rush
Nancy Drew

March 18th
Enchanted - awesome journal
I am Legend
The Seeker
Atonement
Great Easter Movies

March 25th
The Mist
Kite Runner

In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolution, Thomas Kuhn argues that a change, or shift, in a paradigm is not evolutionary, but revolutionary and requires a drastic jump from one system of thought to another.  While our service providers have not abandoned the current paradigm of buckets of minutes, we did see a huge leap to a potential new thought process emerge today. 

Early this morning, Verizon announced that they will be offering an unlimited calls plan for only $99.99 per month beginning today.  This means that you can call anyone on any network anytime and talk as long as you want for the same low price.  No overages or suprise bills!  I was on a very late night conference call with Verizon only hours before the service went live, I can tell you they are extremely excited to bring this service to the American consumer.

Before the ink was even dry on the USA Today article, Verizon's largest competitor in the US annouced a similar plan.  AT&T's program will begin on February 22 and is almost identical to the Verizon plan.

Then, before we could close-up shop T-Mobile upped the ante by not only providing unlimited calling, but also unlimited text and picture messaging for the same $99 per month.

Lastly, factor in the Unlimited by Boost program that runs on the Sprint network and offers plans in a dozen states and unlimited calling plans as low as $45 per month without signing a contract. 

It is simply amazing to me the strides we have made in this business over the past few years.  To go from $500 brick phones with the best services plans giving you 25 cents a minute to having a Free Motorola Razr and unlimited calling packages is nothing short of astounding.  And with Android, Open Networks, WiMax, and many more innovations on the horizon we may have our paradigm shift sooner rather than later. 

Update (2/28/08):  To no great surprise Sprint announced a similar unlimited plan today although they are offering access to all services for the $99 a month.  Now that all the big players are in the game the competitive pricing wars begin.

So, at the end of my previous entry about the new Cleantech partnership, I mentioned a yogurt called Danactive.  This yogurt is a supershot, if you will, of extra bacteria and a specific type of bacteria that helps you eliminate the things in your digestive track that make you sick.  Pro-biotics...there are many who believe in their health benefits, but the comment from Jonathan brings up a really good question.  He notes that yogurt, and in fact many foods are perhaps claiming a space that perhaps they shouldn't be in.  Nutraceuticals...foods that claim medicinal benefits.  

Having finished Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma just a few nights ago, I've been thinking a lot about this topic and in general about food, health, and sustainability.  Quoting Michael Pollan from In Defense of Food, "We are eating a lot of edible food-like substances, which is to say highly processed things that might be called yogurt, might be called cereals, whatever, but in fact are very intricate products of food science that are really imitations of foods."

I know food, in general, is a very sensitive topic for a lot of people, but what do you think should and can be done in the short term to make the industrialized food chain better?  What products should Wal-Mart have that they don't to meet your desires for a more sustainable food assortment?  If you could choose one item you would want remove from stores, what would it be?

We are trying something new at Wal-Mart…amidst the crazy fast, rapidly growing space of clean/green technologies we have found it pretty difficult to do two things:
1. Find the technologies that we should be implementing and
2. Be sure those that we know about are the best options with the most business potential and positive environmental impact.

With this in mind, we’ve decided to partner with Cleantech, a very large network of the people who have the ideas and the people who have the capital to give those ideas business potential.   To begin, we have identified seven initial opportunities we hope to find solutions for.  These first seven areas include: harnessing wind, utilizing organic waste, utilizing household hazardous waste, improving on current forklift battery practices, finding better building materials, utilizing waste and storm water, and utilizing cooking oil waste.

So, you are probably asking yourself why these areas and why is Wal-Mart doing this at all.  Well, first, we believe that these opportunities are just that; key areas of opportunity for us to reach toward our broader goals of zero waste and 100% renewable energy. 

Indeed, we believe they present unique opportunities for us to find technological advancements or encourage them in order to create the business model for more sustainable alternatives than what is widely used today.  Wal-Mart’s size affords it the unique ability, in many cases responsibility, to make substantial direct impact, and even more importantly, to catalyze the creation of new business models that can make broad change. 

I know this may sound unusual for Wal-Mart, but this is what we already do so well.  Our size allows us the unique and exciting opportunity to create markets for products you know…like a new yogurt that strengthens your immune system to market (DanActive, which really does work), or that inexpensive spinning toothbrush (Crest Spinbrush before it was bought by Crest first sold at Wal-Mart).  Why not get excited about using that same buying power to incentivize innovation toward sustainability?
 

So, do you have an idea for Wal-Mart?

It can be an emotional topic, but after last holiday it's a difficult one to avoid.  The topic is toy safety.

At Wal-Mart, we are taking several additional steps to increase toy safety guidelines.  Check out the toy safety link on walmartfacts.com to see what we're doing.  It makes me proud that Wal-Mart is getting out in front of pending legislation and really making a difference.

A few of my teammates just returned from a toy fair in Germany where they were on the lookout for great toys from other parts of the world.  They returned with a lot of fun items and ideas that I'm really excited about.  There were a lot of cute wooden animals, craft and activity sets, construction sets with real bricks and mortar...more to come on that later, as well as other sneak peaks for next year!

It's impossible to forget about what happened last year and retailers, manufacturers and suppliers have all improved because of it.  I feel very good about the steps that we and the entire toy industry has taken to ensure that what happened last year does not happen again this year.  Happy Shopping!