IndiaRetailBiz

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, according to a New York Times report, is gearing up to solve some of the challenges, like healthcare and energy, facing the world.

H. Lee Scott Jr., Chief Executive, Wal-Mart Stores, while speaking to his Store Managers in Kansas (USA), said that in the next three years Wal-Mart will strive to cut the energy consumed by many of its products by 25%. He, however, was not certain as to how the goal would be achieved. “We do not know exactly how we will get there,” said Scott. “Wal-Mart was committed to selling energy-efficient products at low prices to make them accessible to its working-class customers,” added Scott.

Wal-Mart is also exploring the possibility of selling energy efficient electric or hybrid cars and could even install windmills in its parking lots so as to enable its customers to recharge their cars with renewable electricity, says the report.

Wal-Mart, is focussed on energy saving can be gauged from the fact that, in the past three years, it has sold 145 million energy saving Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFL). These are enough to save energy produced by three coal-fired power plants.

On the healthcare front, Wal Mart will force its vendors to meet stricter ethical standards and will apply its legendary cost-cutting skills to help other companies deliver health care for their employees.

Wal-Mart could help major American employers to save $100 million in 2008, by managing and paying their prescription drug claims– a costly task currently handled by companies known as pharmacy benefit managers.

In 2008, Wal-Mart would also try to fill four times more electronic prescriptions (eight million), four times more than the previous year, instead of doctors’ handwritten prescriptions. Handwritten prescriptions could be misread by pharmacists, leading to medical errors.

Wal-Mart has also decided to create a global network of vendors who are socially and environmentally more conscious.

Wal Mart would ask its vendors from China, who are known for flouting environmental rules, to comply with the American environmental regulations and ask them to certify that they meet industry standards.