4 posts tagged “wal-mart”

I went to Target for a few items and while I was looking at light bulbs, a pair of skwerly teenage boys approached me, one pushing an empty shopping cart, the other carrying some sort of ceramic Spider-Man head.  For convenience we'll call them Dip and Shit.

Dip: Hey, look what I found.  (holding the Spider-Man head toward me.)
Me: Yeah, that's awesome, dude.  (backing away.)
Dip: There's something stuck in it, though.  Can you help me get it out?
Me: Sorry, you're on your own with that.
Dip: Please, won't you just help me?

At that point, he was too close, so I put my hand up and said, "Back off, you little jackass."

Shit: Why are you being so rude to him?
Dip: Yeah, why won't you just help me?
Me: Look, assholes, I get it.  You're trying to pull some kind of prank involving whatever you've stuffed into Spidey's head, but you're failing miserably.
Dip & Shit: Uhhhh...
Me: Do you know why you're failing?
Dip & Shit: (giving each other skwerly looks, because they can't decide what to do.)
Me: You're failing, because this is a grade school prank, and you're, what?  Fifteen or sixteen.  Plus, you've got your dopey friend just hanging back with the shopping cart.  If he's your friend, why doesn't he help you?  See why it doesn't work?  It screams set-up.  If you want this to work, you've got to change the dynamics.  At your age, this prank only works if one of you pretends to be a retard and the other one pretends to be his embarrassed friend.  Or better yet, develop a prank that works with your age.  Now go away and stop bothering me.

So, I picked out my light bulbs and moved on to my next item: cat litter.  As I was loading the cat litter into the cart, what do you think I heard?  Dip & Shit trying their prank in the next aisle.  I'll give them this: they were able to take a critique and learn from it.  They were playing it with Shit as the retard and Dip as the embarrassed friend, who would arrive too late and apologize.  I went around the corner and barreled down on them like my hair was on fire.

Me: Kenny, Dylan, what are you doing?
(Now I have no idea what their names were, but I used the infuriated Mom voice and that was enough to get them both to flinch guiltily.  By then I was right on top of them and the hapless grandma they were trying to prank.)
Me: Didn't I warn you not to try this stunt again?  Ma'am, I'm so sorry.  Were they trying to pull a prank on you?
Grandma: Oh, I don't know...
Me: I am so sorry.  He was pretending to be retarded, wasn't he?  Dylan, I swear, my patience with that cruel little joke is over.  I want you boys to go wait in the car for me, and so help me god, if you aren't out there when I finish here, I'll leave you.  You can just walk home.  Now go!

Dip & Shit fled, leaving the Spider-Man head in Grandma's hands.  What had they stuffed in it for their prank?  A package of condoms.

Ten minutes later, I had the last thing on my list, a new filter for the furnace, and I was making my way back to the cashier when I heard someone in the aisle ahead of me, crying and saying, "Billy, where are you?  Help!  I lost my friend, Billy.  Can you help me find my friend?"  Yup, it was Dip (or Kenny, as I now thought of him) playing retarded.  I skidded around the next aisle, just in time to cut off his faux-retard-lope with my cart.  His eyes went wild when he saw me.

Dip: Why are you hassling us?
Me: Because you annoyed me and you're still annoying me.  And Billy?  What kind of pathetically obvious fake name is that?
Dip: We were just messing around.
Me: No, you were annoying me.  If you want to pull pranks, that's fine, but you need to go over to Wal-Mart to do it.
Dip: Wha--why?
Me: Because I don't shop at Wal-Mart.  If you don't get out of here, I'll show you what a prank really looks like.  You want to know what'll happen after I tell the security guard you pulled your pants down and flashed me?

He wasn't stupid.  He ran.

I know you're probably surprised to see that coming from me, but there's the ugly truth: whatever happens to the local economies of middle America, it won't be Wal-Mart's fault.  It will be the fault of legislators who failed to rein in what has become a destructive monopolistic force against the American middle-class.  It will be the fault of all those middle-class Americans who shop at Wal-Mart for their low, low prices, without sparing a thought for how prices get so low. 

Apparently, Wal-Mart's holiday sales binge on flat-panel TV's has driven several smaller big box electronics retailers to the brink of destruction.  That article hardly surprises and doesn't even trouble me.  Big Box vs. Big BIG Box?  It's like Goliath vs. Behemoth.  What troubles me, of course, is that there's still a David vs. Goliath battle going on for small, local retailers, and that underdog triumphs aspect that we loved about the original Biblical story--it's flat out fucking false.  When the deck is stacked like this, David doesn't win.  David isn't winning.  Goliath is making David say, "Uncle."

What surprise me is that consumers continue to be oblivious of the dangers they put themselves.  It's like American consumers have forgotten that they're American workers, too.

I live in a town that has been locked in a battle with Wal-Mart for years.  Siding up with Wal-Mart in their goal to get another store in town: people who are oblivious.  People who don't want to give tax breaks to downtown businesses, because they believe in the "free market."  People who apparently won't mind when the downtown is boarded up and abandoned, like downtowns all over America.  People who like taking a walk around Wal-Mart's parking lot on a lovely Sunday afternoon.  People who look forward to a day when everyone works at Wal-Mart. 

After reading the aforementioned article about how Circuit City and its brethren are choking on Wal-Mart's dust, I took a look at some of the comments people had made.  One genius said, "Without Wal-Mart milk would cost $4.25 a gallon."  So, at some point, this fool has perhaps gotten the impression that Wal-Mart has actually managed to keep the cost of milk down, when in reality, the cost of milk goes up, but Wal-Mart squeezes producers to keep the price low.  What does this mean?  Well, if you're a dairy farmer and you're losing money, I guess you look for ways to cut corners, increase productivity.  That's where the growth hormones come in, where the overuse of antibiotics comes in, where the habit of milking unwell cows becomes acceptable. 

I have these waking nightmares sometimes, in which I imagine a day when Wal-Mart is not just the largest retailer and employer in the country, but the only retailer and employer in the country.  It makes me think of the days of miners trapped in a cycle of debt by the company payroll office and the company store.  Every dime they earned was paid back into the company's coffers.  The only difference is that the miners weren't protected by labor laws--they were trapped.  We're free and still we choose to shop at the company store.

As I knew it would be, my office is a ghost town today.  It's still spring break on campus and it looks like everyone else in the building opted for a long weekend.  I'm here for the usual reasons--not enough vacation saved yet, someone needs to do the pay roll, and the simple fact that I'll probably get more writing done here than I would at home.  I wanted to post a picture of a ghost town to go with what was to be a little discourse on the pleasures and oddities of solitude.  When I went searching for pictures of ghost towns, though, I came across a place I've been:

When I was a kid, my family owned some land up by Pueblo, and the drive there always took us through what's left of Ludlow.  Against my grandmother's protests, my grandad told us about the Ludlow Massacre.  It's a classic tale of what happens when corporate greed finally drives workers to desperate ends.  The only thing surprising about the striking miners' list of demands is that they didn't have those things, things we take for granted:

1. Recognition of the union as bargaining agent
2. An increase in tonnage rates (equivalent to a 10% wage increase)
3. Enforcement of the eight-hour work day law
4. Payment for "dead work" (laying track, timbering, handling impurities, etc.)
5. Weight-checkmen elected by the workers (to keep company weightmen honest)
6. The right to use any store, and choose their boarding houses and doctors
7. Strict enforcement of Colorado's laws (i.e., mine safety rules, abolition of scrip), and an end to the dreaded company guard system

In short, the miners wanted decent working conditions, fair wages, freedom and representation.  Just that.   When they went on strike, they were promptly kicked out of their company-owned houses.  So the union set up an enormous tent village for them.  Things quickly got ugly, with regular altercations between strikers and scabs, of which my great-grandfather was one.  (He was 16 years old in 1914, just a year away from marrying and fathering my grandfather.)   In addition to brawls between the two groups of workers, the company security guards took potshots into the tent city, terrorizing the miners' families, and then the National Guard came in. 

We'd be shocked now if a company used such strong-arm tactics to break a strike or prevent unionization.  We ought to be shocked at the tactics that are used.  Wal-Mart may not have gun-toting Pinkertons patrolling their parking lots, looking for union representatives, but they're still getting away with the oldest trick in the book: firing workers who try to unionize.  Plus they're using what I think of as a new old-fashioned strike-breaking force: lobbyists.  All kinds of companies are trying to put a stop to a new bill that would allow workers to unionize as long as a majority of them signed union cards.  The Wal-Marts of the world would like us to think that the secret ballot elections of the past are the only fair way for employees to unionize.  After all, it's easy to scare people out of voting at a public meeting.  It's harder to scare them out of signing a card in the privacy of their own home.

It's easy to look at the auto industry and see how union greed has contributed to the steady decline of America's car manufacturers, but you can't lay the blame for lousy product designs at the feet of the unions.  And for every problem that unions have created, they've solved a dozen.  Take the 40-hour work week.  Unionization gave us that.  Worker's compensation, too.  Most importantly, unionization protects all the little workers, the invisible nobodies, from the Leviathans of corporate greed
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Don't know what it means when people don't take off Martin Luther King Day. There is some presumption that today is a day to commemorate MLK's contribution to our society, and particularly to civil liberties, but of course, if your employer won't let you have the day off, what are you going to do. I work for a church, a liberal church, so I get the day off. I stayed home and did...nothing much, but when I went for a walk this afternoon, I noted all the people whose employers don't give them the day off. The grocery store is still open. We have to eat, I guess. The tire place is still open. Plenty of landscaping crews out putting down sod. The hardware store is open--no surprise there--those racist old Crackers probably have a party on April 4th.

Is it fair to evaluate an employer on his or her decision to make people work on MLK Day? Maybe it's just a matter of money--small businesses can't afford to give employees a paid holiday. That's just...sad, I guess. But big multinational corporations...I bet they could give their employees a day off to commemorate what Martin did for us. Yeah. You know Wal-Mart's open today.