Usually watching or reading the news is a surefire way to piss me off, so it's nice when such an amusing story comes along, especially when a heartless corporate monolith is the butt of the joke.
Seems Wal-Mart hired a guy in 1970 to tape its annual meetings, big sales meetings and other doings. This continued until 2006, when the relationship was terminated. What wasn't terminated was the 15,000 tapes made in the meantime (even though Wal-Mart, good cheapasses that they were, suggested videographer Flagler reuse the tapes to save money).
So now the video company's new owners, having turned down Wal-Mart's $500,000 offer for all the material, are ready to sell to anyone. I don't know if they'll ever make $500,000 off the tapes, but turning down the offer definitely makes for a better story. And as Wal-Mart will likely forever be involved in lawsuits, the tapes could prove most valuable — assuming Wal-Mart's perfunctory legal challenge on the tapes fails.
The tapes surfaced, so to speak, via a lawsuit against Wal-Mart in which a kid was injured by an exploding gas can.
The plaintiff's attorney Diane M. Breneman says that when she first laid eyes on the racks of tapes, "I thought, 'How could anyone in the world allow this to exist?'" The videos, she says, deal with "everything anyone would want on Wal-Mart ... They've got 30 years of people winging it."
Ouch. That's gotta sting.
Here's hoping lawyers, as well as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, put this stuff to good use.
