A trove of video for Wal Mart detractors

I guess this Wall Street Journal article is available to subscribers only, and that’s too bad, because it’s amazing. [Update: Try this link. Thanks Lisa!]

Apparently Wal-Mart for almost 30 years employed a video-production company called Flagler to film a variety of meetings and management activities and other stuff. Some of this material was used at shareholder meetings and sales meetings and so on. It was all intended for internal use.

In 2006, Wal-Mart stopped using Flagler, a blow for the firm, which claims the Wal-Mart work was 90% of its revenue. So Flagler offered to sell Wal-Mart the whole trove for “several million dollars.” Wal-Mart offered $500,000, “arguing the footage wouldn’t be of interest elsewhere.”

Wrong! Now Flagler sells access to the material to business historians, plaintiffs lawyers, and I guess anybody else who wants to pay for it. So, the WSJ says, this means clips of Wal-Mart people joking about the safety flaws of a product, or talking about union-busting, or calling Hillary Clinton “one of us,” are making their way into the public sphere.

Wal-Mart is “reviewing its legal options.”

If I find (or you tell me about) a better link than the one above, one that anyone can access, or links to any of the actual videos, I’ll update this post with that info.