Wal-Mart's official bloggers criticize products on the shelves

It's odd that Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) is allowing some purchasing and procurement employees to blog on company hours, but it is. The retailer may be experimenting with a new way of openly communicating with the web-browsing public, but blogging is generally where the unvarnished truth comes out -- not marketing spin and BS.

But when official chain bloggers start dropping nasty words on companies that stock products on Wal-Mart shelves, that's a step in a new direction for the world's largest retailer. A procurement employee in charge of deciding which computers get stocked on Wal-Mart shelves said this about Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Vista operating system: "Is it really all that and a bag of chips? My life has not changed dramatically - well, for that matter, it hasn't changed at all." Those aren't the prettiest words to describe Microsoft's most visible consumer PC product, no?

Is Wal-Mart encouraging this kind of frank and critical talk about the products the chain carries? From all accounts, it is. Wal-Mart's buttoned-down culture may not fit in with the level of honesty expected by the internet crowd, and the website Wal-Mart created over the last holiday season -- www.checkoutblog.com -- is a first for the company. As in, a first for an officially sanctioned public forum not published with words from executives, but from little-known buyers writing and expressing opinion without a ton of editing. Is Wal-Mart finally opening up to the world to gain some respect outside the standard lines of marketing-speak that's been in existence for decades? Check out its unfiltered blog and you decide.