Decisions · 86261962
In re Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
Serial No. 86261962 · Decided 2019-01-11 · Other
What happened
Registration refused — the Board found that INVESTING IN AMERICAN JOBS for retail store and promotional services is merely an informational phrase widely used by businesses, government, and media to express support for American jobs, and does not function as a service mark to identify a single source.
The marks
Applicant
INVESTING IN AMERICAN JOBS
Promoting public awareness for goods made or assembled by American workers; retail store services featuring a wide variety of consumer goods; retail grocery stores; online retail store services; convenience store services (Class 35)
Other issues decided
Not du Pont factors. These are separate grounds the Board reached in this case.
| Issue | Weight | What the Board found |
|---|---|---|
| Failure to Function as Source Identifier | Dispositive | The Board found that INVESTING IN AMERICAN JOBS is a commonly used informational phrase conveying support for American manufacturing and employment, widely used by third parties across industries, and therefore fails to function as a service mark. |
Why this decision is significant
Precedential decision with oral hearing applying failure to function doctrine to a patriotic/economic slogan with extensive third-party informational use evidence. Significant for any application involving widely-used informational phrases, particularly patriotic or social-cause slogans.
Research significance is Trademark Valet's editorial rating of how useful a decision is to practitioners. It is not a statement of precedential weight — that is the separate Precedential field, which comes from the Board.
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The original record
Read the opinion and every filing on the Board's own docket. The summary above is our paraphrase, not a quotation from the opinion. The opinion is the authority.
Who checked this
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Provenance — Written from the opinion; research-significance tier confirmed.
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