Wal-Mart: Racism?

In the fall of 1973, my good friend Buddy Cole sent me this link...

Wal-Mart PR Blunders

In a nutshell, here it is...it's short...

"Bringing the ever-friendly spirit of its in-store greeters online, Walmart.com offers DVD shoppers helpful recommendations for films they might be interested in purchasing.

Customers looking at the Web site's product pages for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Planet of the Apes, for instance, are steered toward "similar items" such as Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream/Assassination of MLK and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams says the company is "heartsick" over the incident but has "absolutely no evidence" that the connections were made intentionally."

Wow. No evidence that it was unintentional? Next thing you know, their new line of Klan outfits will be about individualism, and not a symbol of hate.

For a huge corporation, how hard is it really to drill down and find out who actually made this blunder? Are they so top-heavy in their marketing department that teams of marketing specialists, project managers, and implementation people that they could not actually find out who did it? If they could spend the same amount of human capital on PR as they do on overall douche-baggery, I'd shop there.