IRE • Islanders for Responsible Expansion

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Letter to IRE from Walmart's Tara Stewart

At our meeting on March 11th, we suggested that in addition to their elected officials, folks also contact Walmart directly with their concerns. This seemed like a reasonable idea to us. Tara Stewart is Walmart's Senior Public Relations Manager for North and South Carolina. Several of you did contact Tara, and two days later this letter appeared in our inbox:
Amy,

It seems my email has been passed out to your group – is there a way you can email them and request that they not target my work email – all it will mean is that I have to have our ISD group shut it down and it won't get them anywhere.

I gave you my card as a courtesy if you had real questions from our meeting – not to be the target of hate mail. I hoped you would use it professionally as it was intended.

Please pass this onto whomever you've handed out my email address to.

Tara Stewart Senior Manager
Public Affairs and Government Relations
We were copied on a variety of your letters to Tara and her description of them as "hate mail" is an insult and an exaggeration. People deserve to be able to voice their concerns to Walmart. Walmart owes us the respect of listening. A public relations manager's job is to work with the public. How can we expect Walmart to do well by us as a community if they are not even willing to hear us out?

Update: Tara sent us a follow-up promising she would set up a website and email account for community concerns "in the near future." We will give Tara the respect we wish she had given us and keep her email private for now. In the meantime, you can write her a letter at Walmart's postal address:

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
PO Box 2010
Mount Pleasant, SC 29465