Selling Wal-Mart.

On the second floor of Wal-Mart's headquarters, in Bentonville, Arkansas, is a windowless room called Action Alley. In the Wal-Mart idiom, the term "Action Alley" usually refers to the main aisle of the company's two thousand Supercenters--the stores that have upended the retail business by selling enormous quantities of groceries and imported goods at prices that competitors find difficult or impossible to match. At the "home office," as Bentonville is known, Action Alley is the company's war room, a communications center that was set up and is staffed by Washington-based operatives from Edelman, a public-relations firm that advises companies on issues of "reputation management." Wal-Mart corporate culture is parsimonious except in the matter of executive compensation, but, according to a source, the company has been paying Edelman roughly ten million dollars annually to renovate its reputation.

Twenty years ago, Wal-Mart was widely viewed as a scrappy regional retailer, and its founder, Sam Walton, an Ozarks eccentric with a vision of super-discounting, was praised for intuiting the needs of his customers, and for maintaining high morale among his workers. When Walton retired, in 1988 (he died in 1992), the company had revenues of sixteen billion dollars. Today, Wal-Mart is the second-largest company in the world in terms of revenue--only ExxonMobil is bigger. Its revenues last year came to more than three hundred and fifteen billion dollars, with profits of more than eleven billion, and it has developed a reputation as a worldwide colossus that provides poor pay and miserly benefits to its 1.8 million employees. The image of the company is not helped by the immoderation of Sam Walton's widow and children, who together control forty per cent of Wal-Mart's outstanding shares, and who are worth roughly eighty billion dollars; they are, by a striking margin, the richest family in America. (They are worth more than Warren Buffett and Bill Gates combined.)

Wal-Mart is traditionally a Republican-leaning company (during the past fifteen years, more than seventy-five per cent of its political donations have gone to Republicans) and has become a favorite target of Democratic politicians. Hillary Clinton, who once served on Wal-Mart's board, recently returned a five-thousand-dollar donation because of what a campaign spokeswoman said were "serious differences with current company practices." Barack Obama and John Edwards have joined union-led campaigns to denounce the company for its wage-and-benefit policies. Wal-Mart is notably unfriendly to unions; in 2000, when meat-cutters at a single Wal-Mart in Texas organized into a collective-bargaining unit, Wal-Mart responded by shutting down its meat counters across Texas and in five neighboring states. It closed an entire store in Quebec, rather than see workers unionize.

The company has also been criticized for driving American jobs overseas, by demanding immense discounts from its suppliers. Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat who is one of Wal-Mart's main foes in Congress, says that the company, by forcing its suppliers to manufacture goods in China, shows that it "doesn't stand for American values." Wal-Mart has been the subject of numerous unflattering documentaries and books. Even Ron Galloway, the maker of a recent pro-Wal-Mart documentary, "Why Wal-Mart Works and Why That Makes Some People Crazy," has turned against the company. Galloway told me that he now considers Wal-Mart to be a "heartless" employer. "They just instituted a wage cap for long-term employees--people making between thirteen and eighteen dollars an hour. It's a form of accelerated attrition. They can't expect me to defend that," Galloway said.

Two unions--the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers--fund anti-Wal-Mart lobbying groups that catalogue what they see as the company's diverse sins. Each month seems to bring a new, self-inflicted embarrassment. Most recently, Wal-Mart announced that it had fired a technician from its Threat Research and Analysis division (which combats industrial espionage) for eavesdropping on telephone calls made by the Times' Wal-Mart beat reporter, Michael Barbaro. Wal-Mart claims that the technician acted alone; the U.S. Attorney in Arkansas is investigating.

In 2005, Barbaro and another Times reporter, Steven Greenhouse, cited an internal memo written by the company's chief human-resources executive, M. Susan Chambers, in which she suggested that the company could control personnel costs by not hiring unhealthy people. (To keep the sick and the lame off the payroll, Chambers suggested that all jobs should include "some physical activity; e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering.") In the same memo, Chambers noted that forty-six per cent of the children of Wal-Mart's million-plus American employees were uninsured or on Medicaid.

More recently, the company experienced a run of bad publicity when it announced new scheduling policies for its store workers (known as "associates"). Under what critics call the "open availability" policy, workers must make themselves available for different shifts from month to month or risk losing hours. Kathleen MacDonald, a cosmetics-counter ...