Wal Mart

WHEN WAL-MART announced earlier this month that it would not carry a new pregnancy prevention pill, it unwittingly did women a great service.The retailing giant spotlighted one of the best-kept secrets in reproductive health.For more than a generation, doctors knew what most women did not -- that two birth control pills, taken within three days of sex and then again 12 hours later, could prevent pregnancy.Not terminate pregnancy. Prevent it.Doctors would tell women patients who called in a panic, but they did not often volunteer it as part of routine contraceptive advice.

A man wielded a hypodermic needle to rob a 24-hour Wal-Mart in Glen Burnie of unknown items early yesterday, but no one was injured, Anne Arundel County police said.About 3: 30 a.m., a man entered the store at 6721 Chesapeake Center Drive and filled an empty bag with several items, police said.When he tried to leave through a locked side exit and an assistant manager refused to unlock the door, the man raised a hypodermic needle above his head and insisted that the door be opened, police said.

Wal-Mart, far and away the best performing retailer in the nation by all standards, will likely reach annual sales of $96 billion by the year 2000.Without a doubt Sam Walton has one of the most outstanding performance records of any leader. And all of this grew from Walton's first store, a Ben Franklin, which ended 1945 with sales of $80,000.Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Vance Trimble, in his unauthorized biography "Sam Walton," records the major reasons for Walton's success:* Sincere customer appreciation.

Residents opposed to construction of a Wal-Mart in Mount Airy will address the town Planning and Zoning Commission at its meeting tonight.The Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer wants to build an 85,000-square-foot store on 14 acres in Mount Airy Shopping Center at Route 27 and Ridgeville Boulevard.The Planning and Zoning Commission will review a subdivision plat of the proposed site tonight. The meeting begins at 8.Residents opposed to the project formed a group called Us Against the Wal six weeks ago and have organized committees.

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. promised economic development officials from the Eastern Shore yesterday that he would continue to push for Wal-Mart to build a distribution center in Somerset County, despite a new state law forcing the company to pay more for worker health care. Ehrlich said he has not spoken with company officials since the legislature overrode his veto of the Fair Share Health Care Act last week, but that members of his administration have. The governor said the company has given no new indications of its plans for the facility, which would employ nearly 1,000 workers at $12 an hour.

Wal-Mart moved closer to South Carroll yesterday when the Carroll County Planning and Zoning Commission approved the final site plan for a store in New Carroll Center at Routes 32 and 26 in Eldersburg.The national retail chain plans to build a 103,518-square-foot building on 16.9 acres on the site, which is the last undeveloped parcel at the intersection.Wal-Mart has stores in Westminster, Aberdeen, Glen Burnie, Laurel and White Marsh, and plans to open another in Glen Burnie and one in Catonsville.

First it was tearooms in department stores. Then lunch counters at drugstores. Now layaway seems to be seeing its last days as a familiar part of the shopping experience. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has become the latest and biggest retailer to do away with layaway, another sign that the practice that became popular during the credit crunch after World War II is slowly becoming obsolete. The world's largest retailer said yesterday that the service, which it is ending in November, wasn't widely used and that it was becoming too costly to run. Wal-Mart will stop accepting layaway items Nov. 19, and customers will have to pick them up by mid- December.

This summer, a federal court overturned Maryland's so-called Fair Share Health Care law. This law would have forced large employers, primarily Wal-Mart, to spend at least 8 percent of their payrolls on health care or contribute an equal amount to Maryland Medicaid. This wrongheaded bill arose from the notion that Wal-Mart relies on Medicaid to provide health care to many of its employees, thus forcing other taxpayers to subsidize its labor costs. Medicaid spending is indeed out of control, but it's not because companies such as Wal-Mart are abusing it. Rather, it's because the program gives politicians an incentive to overspend.

SHANGHAI, China -- Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the largest retailer in the United States, is poised to become the biggest foreign chain in China with the $1 billion purchase of a major foreign-run Shanghai retailer, people briefed on the deal said. The move is a large step for Wal-Mart's strategy in China, allowing the American retailer to more than double its presence in a country that, despite its size and growing middle class, remains largely untapped by foreign retailers. The size of the acquisition of the Taiwanese-owned supermarket chain Trust-Mart is modest for Wal-Mart, but it is critical because the China market is becoming much more pivotal in the U.S. retailer's overall international strategy.

Few efforts illustrate the breadth of Wal-Mart's ambitions - and the fears that they at times generate - as much as a nearly decade-long drive to establish its own bank. Yesterday, Wal-Mart Stores abruptly abandoned plans for its own bank, withdrawing its application to obtain a special banking charter after heavy criticism from lawmakers, the banking industry and watchdog groups. "We don't plan to do this again," said Jane J. Thompson, Wal-Mart's president for financial services. "The bank is behind us. We will use our partners to roll out new products."