Wal-Mart Image-builder resigns

(via Blue’s News)

Here is a case of someone saying something they shouldn’t have said.  And it comes from the kind of person you wouldn’t expect to say this kind of thing.  So, here are the comments made by the man Wal-Mart recently hired to help build a better image for the company.

“You see those are the people who have been overcharging us,” he said of the owners of the small stores, “and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”

Wow.  Not the thing you’d expect to hear from someone trying to help build a better image for a company with as bad an image as Wal-Mart.  So, who is this outstanding symbol of good image and what did he do about it?

Mr. Young, 74, a former mayor of Atlanta and a former United States representative to the United Nations, apologized for the comments and retracted them in an interview last night.

Well, that’s one way, I suppose.  But really, why would he say this?  I mean, he had to have a reason, right?  Context matters, I’m betting.  It was probably mis-interpreted.  So here’s what he had to say after the fact.  The clues that all was not as it seems.

“It’s against everything I ever thought in my life,” Mr. Young said. “It never should have been said. I was speaking in the context of Atlanta, and that does not work in New York or Los Angeles.”

OK, so he doesn’t think Jews, Koreans or Arabs are bad all over – it’s just the Jews, Koreans, and Arabs in Atlanta.  Damn, that’s some serious foot-in-mouth disease he’s got going on.

[tags]Wal-Mart, Image-building, Hating on the foreigners[/tags]