Smiley And The Wal-Mart Identity Crisis

The smiley on the right (the new “Wal-Mart Works” smiley) looks like its suffering from some kind of mania. The usual Wal-Mart smiley on the left has a feminine aspect–the new logo looks more boyishly masculine. This re-design of the Wal-Mart logo comes at a time when Wal-Mart is not only dealing with a lawsuit alleging that it mistreats female employees, it’s also internally trying to figure out a way to get rid of older female employees because they and their kids will cost Wal-Mart money if they have access to company health benefits.
Wal-Mart is trying to go after a different, more affluent customer. To push up its stock price, it’s trying to re-invent itself as a “hip” discount retailer and lure consumers from places like Best Buy and Target. By making its smiley face less feminine and more maniacally boyish, Wal-Mart gives itself away. There’s no place for low-income women as either shoppers or “associates” in Wal-Mart’s latest attempt to re-invent itself.

Great piece to condider, as there is battle going on here—- trying to keep Wal-Mart, the predatory killer, out of our community.

The eyes on the right are vertical lines, and it occurs to me the only thing each one is missing is a big ‘S’ on top of it.

Vertical lines.
No mistaking them for horizontal lines.
Horizontal lines = Oriental eyes.
Therefore, WalMart is All-American.
All those stories about goods “Made in China” are rumors.
As Ado Annie sings, “a lot of tempest in a pot of tea.”
Oops, sorry. Tea is so Oriental, isn’t it.
Wonder if the WalMart people are keeping close tabs on GM these days.

The eyes (on the right smiley) remind me of coin slots.

the one to the right reminds me of an electrical outlet.

I wonder if perhaps the pro-Walmart movie is suffering from feelings of guilt, and made up for it by really over-doing the whole “good Walmart” angle; so that by the end, you feel dirty and used. And that goes for the smiley, which really seems waaay overboard. The smile dominates so much that it almost seems mocking. The one on the left seems soft and friendly. But the one on the right really looks like he’s drugged-up and might even hurt you. And I think he just might.

I’d be happier if the “evil smiley” didn’t come off as slightly “Oriental.” Wrong message! This observation applies mostly to the way it looks here, much less so to the poster at Huff-Po.

The vertical eyes look caffeinated … and if they were any closer togeter they would resemble the world trade center buildings.

Phredd and Eva, you beat me to it. I saw dollar signs too, and then coin slots. Moolah! Moolah! Dollar signs in the eyes. That’s about as powerful a message you can send.

Vertical eyes?
Snakes, for sure.

I think the overall message of the happy poster is “we are not a threat,” in order to counter the manacing aspect of the other. The happy smiley is slightly askew and assymetric, including the mouth and eyes, rather than vertical and symmetric. It implies, hey, we’re not perfect, but neither are our customers, and that’s ok, we’re all just folks. We are too simple to be plotting the evil of which we are accused. Kind of like the CEO who won aquittal by claiming he was a simple guy who did not understand the machinations done to the books. Symmetry implies hierarchy, so in this case assymetry is used to suggest a grass-roots organization rather than a corporate, and menacing, hierarchy. Assymetry and diagonal lines suggest motion or instability, in this case perhaps expressing vulnerability. The image also evokes a benign sun in the sky over the store. Happy sunny days, not a cloud in sight, everything is fine. Actually using a smiley face as the company symbol or character is about as close to the generic icon as you can get, with no cultural baggage, aside from the 1970s itself, no ethnicity, no way anyone could take offense. The human face has characteristics of sexual display, specifically the resemblance of the nose to the male genitalia, so the lack of a nose is key to the non-threatening nature of the smiley face. It is also a reference to childhood, as a childlike cartoon character with no real character. The vertical eyes may be meant to evoke the raised eyebrows of being non-threatening, of engagement, approachability. (Librarians are taught to lift the eyebrows at the reference desk to be less threatening, to be more approachable to customers. Something about doing that with the face removes any threat. Think of the opposite, if the brow is lowered, and you get the effect.) The usual oval or round eyes have a bit of vacant prozac hollow creepy stare to them. There is also the evocation of roundness in the shading, somewhat like a balloon, another totally non-threatening object, even vulnerable. A balloon is also smooth, all surface visible, nothing hidden. Maybe another reason for narrowing the eyes, to look more like lines drawn rather than dark holes. The linear representation of the eyes is definitely evoking a line on a surface. But they are not curved as they should be on a sphere, suggesting they are looking directly at the viewer, i.e. looking you square in the eyes, honesty. Another reference to say, “we are all surface, no depth, no hidden agenda beneath the surface.” Something about the convex surface and the sphere having the smallest surface area for the enclosed volume. No surface to get ahold of, no depth to reveal flaws, no imperfections, a blank slate, no indication of what lies beneath, or the implication that it is nothing but surface, nothing at all except what you see. No flat surfaces or edges that could threaten, but all smooth surface. Their use of the smiley face as a symbol for the company projects a benign, non-threatening, childlike, even vulnerable persona. Who could feel threatened by that?

I’ve seen the Robert Greenwald Wal-Mart movie (don’t worry, I promise not to give away the ending), and I have to say that now I believe everything Wal-Mart does is TOTALLY EVIL!!
From Michael’s blog on HuffPo about the pro-Wal-Mart poster: “Just consider the first rule of story making: Don’t tell us, show us. The ‘pro’ poster does little more than issue a textual statement.”
If you ever really watch a Wal-Mart commercial (and you get to see several in the movie), the marketing strategy is exactly the same. Actors dressed as Wal-Mart employees tell the viewer, “I have a great job!” It’s kind of the same logic that the current administration uses: Tell the people the opposite of the truth and they just might buy it! (In fact, people do seem to buy it — for the first few years, anyway.)

As a graphic designer and past ad-agency art director, all I see here is a way to trademark YOUR particular smiley. It’s all hideous anyway.

They may be trying to convey that they are looking you right in the eye, being really straightforward. The one on the left is almost coy in the way it doesn’t look you straight on. The newer one goes too far – that look is so ‘in your eye’ that it’s borderline hostile, e.g. ‘in your face’.

At face value, there may be less here than you think. A simpler, more mundane reason for the slight difference in smileys may just be simple legality.
Perhaps the makers of Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price and Why Wal-Mart Works differentiated their smilies for simple emotional effects, but I’ll wager they mostly wanted to avoid a trademark infringement lawsuit.
Due to the confusion over the source of the original smiley, the basic design was never copyrighted. Nobody owns the overall concept, but Wal-Mart has registered their specific smiley with the United States Patent and Trademark Office under Serial Number 76320901 (here’s a screenshot of the record).
It’s surprising how similar THCOLP’s anti-smiley is to Wal-Mart’s registered version: apparently the addition of two evil eyebrows is enough to avoid trouble. In similar fashion, you’d think that WWMW’s pro-smiley could more comfortably get away with happy eyebrows instead of vertical eye-slits.
But maybe then the attorneys would have to get involved, and nobody would Have a Nice Day!

the smiley on the right looks too eager and vacant. It’s practically jumping out of itself to smile in my face. The poster places the vacant gaze of neo-Smiley so prominantly, I barely even see the Wal-Mart leaving its ugly scar on the landscape. So perhaps the new design, as you and others mentioned, is to hypnotize. It is an emblem that means “Feel good about Wal-Mart.” The more we see it, perhaps the more we will associate smiling with the business. To me, though, it looks like the glazed-over eyes of a brainwashed convert, urging me to join. There is no depth to the eyes. They are there, but they do not “see.”

In addition to the problem of the new smiley’s slit-eyes, I want to know what’s going on with the corners of its mouth. Why is the left corner diamond-shaped and the right corner triangle-shaped? Why aren’t the corners of the mouth the same? Is it the Dick Cheney smiley, soon to morph into a crooked evil grimace? Is it just a sloppy computer-illustration mistake? The asymmetry of the new smiley’s whole mouth bugs me. However, I never liked Wal-Mart’s old smiley, either. (Didn’t it used to whistle in one of the commercials? I remember hating something about the sound of the smiley commercial and grabbing desperately for the remote to hit MUTE.) The old smiley looks like a creepy, vacant-eyed Ping-Pong-ball person after it’s been abducted by aliens and returned to Earth. The new smiley looks like the old smiley smashed flat. How can someone make something so simple look so BAD? Didn’t the Wal-Mart smileys go through an approval process? Of the 3 smileys, I find the middle one the most comforting, maybe because I know where it stands.

I’m Ron Galloway, the director of “Why Wal-Mart Works.” The reason my poster has weird eyes is because I suck at Adobe Illustrator.
Thanks for the mention. Any publicity helps.
Ron

Thanks for clearing that up for us, Ron! That’s a much more comforting answer than any Wal-Mart’s-trying-to-hypnotize-us conspiracy-theory answer. But you do know that Wal-Mart is evil, right? Do you think you will see Robert Greenwald’s movie?

readytoblowagasket, could Ron be moonlighting for the government, or suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness ?
“Wal-Mart, I genuinely believe, does more for poor and blue-collar workers in this country than any special interest group does. So you have to take the good with the bad. And like everything else — I’ve said it before — the truth lies somewhere in the middle of my film and Mr. Greenwald’s film. But Wal-Mart genuinely serves the poor more than almost any other institution, except the government, that I can think of. ” -Ron Galloway Democracy Now Nov 18, 2005

jt from B.C.: What I think is that Ron is not as much of a Luddite as he claims and that he has in fact infected all our computers with Wal-Mart spyware. Did someone personally invite him to our conversation, or was he Googling “Wal-Mart” and “evil” and found us on his own?
As for his Wal-Mart-serves-poor-people quote, I’d like to point out to him the following, without even mentioning Wal-Mart:
a) Poor “workers” (his word) in the U.S. don’t have a lobbying group strictly for them, which is what a “special-interest group” really is. From the ACLU website: “Poor people are one of the least powerful groups in the U.S. and their civil liberties are therefore always in a precarious state.”
b) No, we don’t have to “take” the “bad,” particularly when the bad is abusive, illegal, or corrupt.
c) The “government,” as in the federal one, no longer “serves” the poor — genuinely or otherwise — so serving the poor more than the govt does is not anything to crow about.

How soon we forget. From the September 6, 2005 Washington Post:

Wal-Mart at Forefront of Hurricane Relief
…Wal-Mart’s response to Katrina — an unrivaled $20 million in cash donations, 1,500 truckloads of free merchandise, food for 100,000 meals and the promise of a job for every one of its displaced workers — has turned the chain into an unexpected lifeline for much of the Southeast and earned it near-universal praise at a time when the company is struggling to burnish its image.
While state and federal officials have come under harsh criticism for their handling of the storm’s aftermath, Wal-Mart is being held up as a model for logistical efficiency and nimble disaster planning, which have allowed it to quickly deliver staples such as water, fuel and toilet paper to thousands of evacuees.

It’s not conspiracy, just good corporate management. FEMA didn’t look so good in comparison, but taxpayers probably don’t want to fund a standby fleet of hundreds of semis, either.
And, all those Wal-Mart trucks—not to mention everyone else, rich and poor—would go nowhere fast without the state and federal highway system under our wheels.

fotonique, great to get your point of view, I was not surprised or impressed by Wal-Marts “largess” or by FEMA’s response.
Debunking Wal-Mart’s Hurricane Relief Efforts
http://www.corp-research.org/archives/sep-oct05.htm

fotonique: Hola! I was wondering when you’d contribute. I don’t have the time or energy to list all of Wal-Mart’s well-documented abuses and violations of workers’ rights, human rights, environmental laws, safety issues, and promises to “give back” to the communities it invades and destroys, but the Greenwald movie makes Michael Moore look like a pussycat. If “good corporate management” means harrassing, spying on, and firing workers who want to form unions, denying women opportunities for advancement, doctoring timecards when people work overtime, not paying a livable wage or offering affordable health insurance, discriminating in every way, shape, and form, then yes, Wal-Mart has FANTASTIC corporate management.
Also, if John Grisham can donate $5 million to Katrina relief efforts, I’m not impressed with Wal-Mart’s $20 million. Look here to break down Wal-Mart’s generosity: http://thinkprogress.org/2005/09/05/walmart-katrina/
I remember being totally shocked when I heard Wal-Mart’s initial donation for Katrina relief was a whopping $2 million.

readytoblowagasket
I know it’s a bit of a stretch and perhaps I need a Shrink, but when I pass the Wal-Mart compounds I get a feeling of “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work will make you free) Do you think I should seek medical assistance ?

jt from B.C.: I don’t think you need medical assistance at all; you always sound quite sane to me, for whatever that’s worth! Even American industrialist Henry Ford said, “There is joy in work.” I don’t think it’s the work itself that’s the issue for W-M employees (except in its factories in Bangladesh, China, and elsewhere overseas). I think it’s that people all too often can’t afford to make ends meet when they take a job at Wal-Mart. Ford also said, “There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.” Wal-Mart doesn’t do any of these three things, especially when you calculate the true cost of those goods.

JTFBC, RTBAG: May all of us be judged so thoroughly for our shortcomings. In the case of Katrina, Wal-Mart could have chosen to go down another road altogether, but didn’t.
Hate to break this off, but I’ve gotta go grocery shopping at you-know-where. It’s so annoying to save 15% compared to the other food stores around here…

Oh, fotonique, what ARE we going to do with you? I was hoping you’d take my Henry Ford reference to task regarding how anti-union he was! Maybe when you have more time…

Actually, I read somewhere that prices at Wal-Mart, while on teh surface are lower, one winds up spending MORE than at other places. I wish I could remember where I heard that so I could link it. Darn turkey has made me sleepy….
Oh, and we won’t shop for groceries at Wal-Mart. The produce sucks, is overpriced, and there is no “store brand” to beat the name brands. If we need groceries, we go to teh local supermaket and purchase fresh produce from roadside stands in season.

• GrapeNuts Family Size @ Safeway: $4.39
• GrapeNuts Family Size @ Wal-Mart: $3.59
I wish I could get some sleep at night, if only my conscience didn’t bother me so much.
RTBAG: I tried counting Model T’s, but there’s no end to them…
(OTOH)

fotonique: Let us know what you spend your 80 cents on!

the first impression was mentioned above, coin slots. looks like an electrical outlet too, which is what you would see right before plugging in a happy face nitelite.