Wal-Mart Tilting at Windmills?

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (Bentonville, Ark.) has announced its intention to expand its focus on energy-savings, international trade and U.S. health care costs.

Lee Scott, ceo of the world’s largest retailer, told an annual store managers’ gathering in Kansas City, Mo., that the company will push for more energy-saving products for Wal-Mart shoppers, work with other retailers on social and environmental standards for the foreign companies they buy from and trim prescription and health records costs at home.

According to a report in the International Herald-Tribune, Scott said the company may even someday install windmills or solar panels at its stores that would allow shoppers to charge electric vehicles. And it is talking with automakers about a possible role in the hybrid and electric car market, although Scott said those ideas were still “out there.”

Scott spoke before about 7000 Wal-Mart store managers in Kansas City, where the company holds a convention center meeting at the start of every year to look at new products and sales plans for the year ahead.

“Wal-Mart can take a leadership role,” he said, “get out in front of the future and make a difference that is good for our business and the world.”

Specifically, said the Herald-Tribune, Scott laid out three areas for Wal-Mart's attention.

* He said rising energy costs are hurting Wal-Mart customers, so the retailer will work with its suppliers to offer more energy-saving products. A Wal-Mart statement said this will include making its most energy-intensive products, such as computers, microwaves and water heaters, 25 percent more efficient within three years. It will also seek to cut power use by the flat-screen televisions it sells by 30 percent by 2010.

* Wal-Mart will launch an effort with other major retailers to improve social, ethical and environmental standards among its global suppliers, finding a way to share joint auditing of foreign factories, which now are visited by inspectors from many individual customers. In China, Wal-Mart largest single supplier, Scott said the company will work with the government to make sure suppliers comply with Chinese environmental laws.

* On U.S. health care, Scott said Wal-Mart can help drive down the costs of prescriptions beyond the $4 generic drugs it has introduced. It will contract with “select employers” to help them manage their employee prescription claims and processing and will work with doctors to increase the number of electronic prescriptions, which it said will save costs compared to paper records, and introduce electronic health records for all its U.S. employees and retirees by the end of 2010.