Wal-Mart ends it's automated film suggestions. Thanks to DailyKos and Digg.com for circulating the story, Wal-Mart now ends the racist film suggestions. One step at a time...
Wal-Mart Stores is shutting down the automated system that creates movie recommendations on its shopping website after the system randomly linked a Planet of the Apes DVD to films about African-Americans including Martin Luther King Jr., the company said Thursday.
Under "Similar Items," the page linked shoppers to four movies about the lives of the slain civil-rights leader, actress Dorothy Dandridge, boxer Jack Johnson and singer Tina Turner. It was manually changed by 5:30 p.m. CT to link shoppers instead to DVD sets of Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond and Star Wars.
"Walmart.com's item mapping process does not work correctly and at this point is mapping seemingly random combinations of titles. We were horrified to discover that some hurtful and offensive combinations are being mapped together," Williams said.
So, linking Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., PhD to Planet of the Apes TV series was an accident? Sure. And Wal-Mart doesn't hire illegal immigrants to clean stores, recommend employees join welfare programs, and squeezes profits from communities at the expense of other businesses.
If Americans can keep the pressure on Wal-Mart, cheap carbon may become a diamond of how capitalism should be done aka Henry Ford (minus his anti-Semitic views). Investors, stockholders, and employees should stand up to the executives on the behalf of old fashioned, moral capitalism. Executives don't own the company, they run it. Big difference. Alienating customers, harming local and national economies, and driving people to social programs is not what American businesses should stand for.