If you opened your local newspaper today, in between the department store white sales and the latest from Iraq, you might have seen Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott defending the pay and benefits it offers its employees in a full-page ad. The ad ran in about 100 newspapers and talked about how the company really does offer competitive wages and lots of opportunity for advancement blah blah blah.

Wal-Mart also launched the Orwellian-titled walmartfacts.com to educate us about their inate wonderfulness and how misunderstood those of us who don't favor Wal-Mart really are.

I don't know what this little PR fusillade cost today, but you have to wonder if it even occurred to anyone over in Bentonville that the money spent here could have been funneled into pay raises for associates. And lo and behold, the free publicity from doing the right thing might have had more impact and payoff than this transparently phony ploy today.