A story at GreenBiz.com recently caught our attention. Turns out that there's an interesting side business for the company that Sam Walton created.

When Wal-Mart isn't getting vendors to pare prices down to the bone or leveraging new locations to maximize business from rural Americans with too few places to shop (and often closing those few that they do have in the process) the company is consulting with a variety of businesses on how to become green and lean cost-cutting machines. The most common projects involve lighting retrofits and building controls.

Read the whole story on Wal-Mart's Supplier Energy Efficiency Program (SEEP) here.

And despite the program's name you don't have to be a Wal-Mart vendor to utilize their penny pinching know how. Participants just have to pay for the independent engineering firm for the retrofits, although as noted in the story Wal-Mart receives a small margin for each project.
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