Walmart

Walmart Canada president and CEO David Cheesewright is scheduled to speak next week at the Jefferies 2011 Global Consumer Conference near Boston. Walmart doesn’t typically push country presidents on stage at investor conferences except at its own analysts’ meetings when it has hosted events overseas in such places as China earlier this year or prior years in Brazil and the United Kingdom. However there are some interesting things going on in Canada these days, and the Jefferies event is an opportunity for Walmart to showcase some of its management talent.

Bentonville, Ark. -- A report Thursday by Bloomberg said that Wal-Mart Stores is battling rising commodity prices by working with its suppliers to avoid price increases, among other strategies.

“We find creative ways to work around it,” Doug McMillon, president and CEO of Wal-Mart International, told Bloomberg. “First we try to keep our costs as low as we can, secondly work with our supply chain as best we can.”

Walmart executive were said to be among a group of major retailers who met with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Wednesday to discuss the elimination of the city’s “food deserts,” essentially areas where roughly 450,000 residents don’t have convenient access to fresh food.

According to an AP report, representatives from Walmart, Walgreen, Aldi and three other chains who were not identified met with Emanuel who reportedly showed a detailed map of the city’s food deserts and made an appeal for projects in specific areas.

Walmart is moving forward with what could be characterized as a roll out of its Neighborhood Market format nearly 13 years after the first unit opened in the fall of 1998. Just don’t call it a Neighborhood Market.

This sounds like a pretty cool deal. Walmart’s wholly-owned video-on-demand subsidiary Vudu and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment in an exclusive arrangement this week offered a new type of digital move card for the science fiction film, Battle: Los Angeles.

The cards cost $14.96 and went on sale the same day as the Blu-ray and DVDs. The big difference between buying the physical Blu-ray disc or DVD is customers who purchase the card simply enter a code to access the film directly from a computer or more than 300 different Vudu-enabled consumer electronics devices.

New York City -- Wal-Mart Stores is ramping up the opening of its mid-sized Neighborhood Market format, which is being renamed Walmart Market, said  Bill Simon, president and CEO, Walmart U.S., on Wednesday at the William Blair & Co. Growth Stock Conference in Chicago.

The Market stores, which average around 42,000 sq. ft., are delivering returns on the same level as supercenters, Simon said, and can be approved and built in less time.

Washington, D.C. -- The Retail Industry Leaders Association, the International Council of Shopping Centers and Paladino and Co., announced Tuesday a collaborative discussion among retailers and commercial shopping center developers to bridge the current landlord and tenant divide that exists around creating sustainable, energy-efficient retail stores in the United States.

Participants in the June 9 roundtable included Wal-Mart, Petco, Ann Taylor, Target, VF Corp., Best Buy, Westfield, Vornado and Kimco, among others.

Johannesburg, South Africa -- A Tuesday report by Bloomberg said that South Africa’s Economic Development Ministry made an “aggressive intervention” in Wal-Mart Stores’ bid to buy a stake in Massmart Holdings Ltd.

South Africa’s Trade, Economic Development and Agriculture Ministries made a joint bid to the Competition Tribunal to force Wal-Mart to restrict imports if it buys a controlling stake in Johannesburg-based Massmart, concerned about job losses.