Thursday, June 04, 2009

Good news, bad news

With GM's announced bankruptcy yesterday and the loss of about 20,000 jobs that will come with it, it was nice to hear that Wal-Mart will be back filling some of those losses this coming year. According to a new press release, Wal-Mart plans to fill about 22,000 jobs, some of which will be in Michigan.

I'm not a big fan of Wal-Mart; in fact, I avoid it as much as possible. It's large, it's always busy, I can never find anything, and it takes approximately 3 weeks to check out.

But there are some good things that they are doing, including some environmental things that may have some big impacts. You can't deny that they are one of the largest employers in the nation, and so anything positive they do will have a big impact. It's nice that this announcement comes as a media-painted-bleak time.

It was also interesting to see GM's new PR commercials, launched the same day as their announcement. They are good. It's inspirational. It's patriotic. It's hopeful. I'm not a GM fan in particular, but I'd like to see the American car companies survive...but they have to be able to compete. Hopefully, this means that the American car companies have seen the light and will start to give the American people what they want and give the foreign car companies a run for their money.

Let's see if the good PR campaign can become a reality.

2 comments:

bh said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
bh said...

They simply have to make better cars with the same quality as Toyota/Honda. They also have to manage their business better and get rid of the union somehow. But this administration is obviously in the union's back pocket. What President fires a CEO of a publicly held company (other than Hugo Chavez)? Why not fire the union chairman also? That union has killed GM - even if they made crappy cars they would still be in business today if it weren't for the UAW.