Wal-Mart Scripts a Response to Movie

The world’s biggest retailer has a message for its employees: Look out for No. 1.

In response to Robert Greenwald’s documentary “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price,” the company has distributed a two-page “script” for store managers to read to workers, warning that critics are out to get them too.

The script, sent to stores shortly before the film’s premiere week at the beginning of the month, directs managers to impart Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s views about the movie, labor unions and “hurtful untruths” about the company.

Greenwald’s film aims to damage the retailer’s reputation by “presenting an inaccurate view of the company,” managers were told to tell employees.

“We believe they want to hurt out company’s growth, sales momentum for the fourth quarter holiday season and, ultimately, each and every associate,” the script said. “Our critics will take everything they can and use it against us.”

Greenwald, whose low-budget condemnation of the retailer’s business practices has garnered generally positive reviews from film critics, said he was surprised that Wal-Mart would go to the trouble.

“The fact that they would call a meeting to tell their employees how to respond struck me as somewhere between brainwashing and foolishness,” Greenwald said. “People see a movie and decide what they’re going to think.”

A spokeswoman for Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart, which previously released a 10-page media kit attacking the film, said the communique was a routine way of responding to employee questions.

“We make it a practice to help make sure we provide our associates with accurate information about our business, as opposed to them getting it from biased third parties with an agenda,” spokeswoman Sarah Clark said.

“In this case, this will help them sort the facts from the fiction they have been seeing as the media has covered the propaganda video that came out this month.”