When corporate PR efforts go bad

Whatever Andrew Young might've accomplished during his tenure as "chairman of Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group created and financed by the company to trumpet its accomplishments," he pretty much managed to undo in a matter of seconds this week, followed by an almost immediate resignation.

The civil rights leader Andrew Young, who was hired by Wal-Mart to improve its public image, resigned from that post last night after telling an African-American newspaper that Jewish, Arab and Korean shop owners had “ripped off” urban communities for years, “selling us stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables.”

In the interview, published yesterday in The Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly, Mr. Young said that Wal-Mart “should” displace mom-and-pop stores in urban neighborhoods.

“You see those are the people who have been overcharging us,” he said of the owners of the small stores, “and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”

I suspect "Wal- Mart PR flack attacks Jews, Koreans, Arabs" isn't the sort of headline they were looking for.