Even I am tiring of this topic, FWIW. But sometimes an example of what I'm talking about comes along and proves so good as to be irresistable.
Accroding to this newspaper editorial, John Edwards righteously refused to give a reading of his new book at evil ol' Wal*Mart that treats its employees so badly, choosing instead to read at a nearby middle-class-approved Barnes & Noble.
Why do I care?
Because that Barnes & Noble starts it's employees at $7.00 per hour.
The Wal*Mart starts at $7.50.
Could somebody tell me again about how dislike of Walmart is based on concern for the underpaid workers?
I'm sorry, it is all about pandering for the votes of middle class people who think Wal*Mart is tacky and, consciously or not, use "The poor don't know what's best for them, we do" as an excuse to keep that big ugly store out of their backyards.
CC
who doesn't want a big ugly Wal*Mart in her backyard either, of course, but is at least honest with herself about why.
Showing posts with label Wal-Mart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wal-Mart. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Monday, November 20, 2006
John Edward's Kid: Living Proof that there are Two Americas
You know, I was about to just let this go. A few days ago, I got my hands on a copy of the world’s most sanctimonious press release from Wal*Mart, trumpeting that for all John Edwards’ crap about the evils of Wal*Mart, one of Edwards’ staffers tried to jump in line to get the Senator a Playstation 3 from Wal*Mart.
Yeah, it was pretty blogworthy, but again, this was the most sanctimonious press release ever and my tolerance for such things is low.
Then I read a little bit more on the incident. Jeff Taylor at Reason writes what I’d like to think I would have about Edwards the Wal*Mart shopper in the context of Edwards’ previous statements on the company.
That got me curious, so I started hunting around for other commentary on Edward’s statements
From the AP story:
“Edwards, the Democrats' vice presidential candidate in 2004, spoke Wednesday to supporters of union-backed WakeUpWalMart.com on a conference call launching the group's holiday season campaign to pressure Wal-Mart for better labor standards.
In the call, he repeated a story about his son Jack disapproving of a classmate buying sneakers at Wal-Mart. "If a 6-year-old can figure it out, America can definitely figure this out," Edwards said.
For the record, John Edwards, six year old kids do not buy sneakers at Walmart.
Their parents do.
I, for one, wouldn’t buy my theoretical kid’s clothes at Wal*mart because the clothes at Wal*mart are, on the whole, fugly.
My guess is two kinds of parents buy their kids sneakers from Wal*mart:
1. Poor parents who can’t afford to do otherwise.
2. Stingy parents who (one hopes) don’t realize that little kids are brutal to each other over such things.
When I was in elementary school there was a kid whom the other kids called “K-mart Kid” because her single mom bought her cheap clothes.
Kmart Kid is now 30 and doing cool stuff in the Physics department at a University in Colorado.
But I doubt she has forgotten what she went through.
Linguist Friend has written before about his gay son, and I think mentioned that when his son was six, a friend of LF’s predicted that the son was going to grow up to be gay.
My early prediction? This Edwards kid is going to grow up to be an asshole. And even if we believe everything the Edwards campaign has said about how the Edwards had no idea the staffer buying his Christmas presents was going to use Walmart, Daddy’s pride in his son's self-righteousness leaves little question where kiddo gets it from.
CC
Yeah, it was pretty blogworthy, but again, this was the most sanctimonious press release ever and my tolerance for such things is low.
Then I read a little bit more on the incident. Jeff Taylor at Reason writes what I’d like to think I would have about Edwards the Wal*Mart shopper in the context of Edwards’ previous statements on the company.
That got me curious, so I started hunting around for other commentary on Edward’s statements
From the AP story:
“Edwards, the Democrats' vice presidential candidate in 2004, spoke Wednesday to supporters of union-backed WakeUpWalMart.com on a conference call launching the group's holiday season campaign to pressure Wal-Mart for better labor standards.
In the call, he repeated a story about his son Jack disapproving of a classmate buying sneakers at Wal-Mart. "If a 6-year-old can figure it out, America can definitely figure this out," Edwards said.
For the record, John Edwards, six year old kids do not buy sneakers at Walmart.
Their parents do.
I, for one, wouldn’t buy my theoretical kid’s clothes at Wal*mart because the clothes at Wal*mart are, on the whole, fugly.
My guess is two kinds of parents buy their kids sneakers from Wal*mart:
1. Poor parents who can’t afford to do otherwise.
2. Stingy parents who (one hopes) don’t realize that little kids are brutal to each other over such things.
When I was in elementary school there was a kid whom the other kids called “K-mart Kid” because her single mom bought her cheap clothes.
Kmart Kid is now 30 and doing cool stuff in the Physics department at a University in Colorado.
But I doubt she has forgotten what she went through.
Linguist Friend has written before about his gay son, and I think mentioned that when his son was six, a friend of LF’s predicted that the son was going to grow up to be gay.
My early prediction? This Edwards kid is going to grow up to be an asshole. And even if we believe everything the Edwards campaign has said about how the Edwards had no idea the staffer buying his Christmas presents was going to use Walmart, Daddy’s pride in his son's self-righteousness leaves little question where kiddo gets it from.
CC
Saturday, November 04, 2006
On buying locally
When at the Farmer's Market ordering my grass-fed, free-range turkey for Thanksgiving this year, I took a good look at the farm's truck. It looked to me like a ratty old refrigerated farm truck. Now these guys were from Culpeper, only 70 miles or so from me. But I know lots of other farmers drive in from Pennsylvania and West Virginia for my farmer's market.
Which raises the question, at least in my head, are we really sure that buying locally saves that much energy?
If I were to, say, buy a turkey at the grocery store that was from Idaho, my guess is that it would have been slaughtered, frozen and sent to Virginia on a freight train the way most groceries are. On a per-bird basis, are we sure that would take more energy than the little refrigerated farm truck bringing in a few dozen birds from 70 miles away, or two states away?
I'm guessing there's something obvious that I'm missing here.
CC
Which raises the question, at least in my head, are we really sure that buying locally saves that much energy?
If I were to, say, buy a turkey at the grocery store that was from Idaho, my guess is that it would have been slaughtered, frozen and sent to Virginia on a freight train the way most groceries are. On a per-bird basis, are we sure that would take more energy than the little refrigerated farm truck bringing in a few dozen birds from 70 miles away, or two states away?
I'm guessing there's something obvious that I'm missing here.
CC
Friday, September 22, 2006
What the heck, one more on Wal-Mart
All of y'all who get so teary-eyed when Walmart pressures a supplier into lowering its prices better get out your hankies. According to the Washington Post, this time Wal-Mart is going after *sniffle* those poor, innocent pharmaceutical companies.
Yep, those evil bastards at Wal-Mart have a plan to sell generic drugs for $4. (Item: CC's birth control is a generic, even with double health insurance she pays $8.)
First they sell affordable clothing, then affordable food and now affordable medication to their mostly-poor customer base. What evil plot to destroy our national fabric will they come up with next?
CC
Yep, those evil bastards at Wal-Mart have a plan to sell generic drugs for $4. (Item: CC's birth control is a generic, even with double health insurance she pays $8.)
First they sell affordable clothing, then affordable food and now affordable medication to their mostly-poor customer base. What evil plot to destroy our national fabric will they come up with next?
CC
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Avoiding the Target
So why is it that some big box stores are OK?
There’s a store out there that give some 70 percent of its political contributions to Republicans.
They buy lots of goods that are cheaply made overseas.
In rural stores, they start their employees out at a little over minimum wage and they frequently show up on lists of large employers with the largest numbers of people on state assistance programs.*
They allow their pharmacists to refuse to dispense emergency contraception. Planned Parenthood is campaigning against them.
They aren’t unionized, of course, but their pissed-off employees still have a website
Yet the only people wanting to boycott them are upset with them kicking out the Salvation Army or are doing it for other wacky reasons
And most of my liberal friends shop there. I know I do. I haven’t been in a Walmart in at least a year. But every time we need furnace filters, dish soap or a cheap birthday present for my brothers, TheCSO and I head right out there.
To Target.
Not that I don’t like Target. I really do. I far prefer it to Walmart. It’s owned by a Minneasota Senator’s family rather that the ever-creepy Waltons. They sell nice-looking lamps and do a nice job advertising how socially responsible they are. They do a great job appealing to the upper-middle class and they are smaller so the numbers of people they are screwing over appear far less impressive.
But they actually give a slightly greater percentage of their PAC money to Republicans than WalMart does.
CC
*Along with other places that hire lots of people for unskilled labor. Fast food chains, large staffing agencies, grocery chains, etc, all have a lot of people uninsured. All of them hire lots of poor people. In general, poor people are more likely to be uninsured.
There’s a store out there that give some 70 percent of its political contributions to Republicans.
They buy lots of goods that are cheaply made overseas.
In rural stores, they start their employees out at a little over minimum wage and they frequently show up on lists of large employers with the largest numbers of people on state assistance programs.*
They allow their pharmacists to refuse to dispense emergency contraception. Planned Parenthood is campaigning against them.
They aren’t unionized, of course, but their pissed-off employees still have a website
Yet the only people wanting to boycott them are upset with them kicking out the Salvation Army or are doing it for other wacky reasons
And most of my liberal friends shop there. I know I do. I haven’t been in a Walmart in at least a year. But every time we need furnace filters, dish soap or a cheap birthday present for my brothers, TheCSO and I head right out there.
To Target.
Not that I don’t like Target. I really do. I far prefer it to Walmart. It’s owned by a Minneasota Senator’s family rather that the ever-creepy Waltons. They sell nice-looking lamps and do a nice job advertising how socially responsible they are. They do a great job appealing to the upper-middle class and they are smaller so the numbers of people they are screwing over appear far less impressive.
But they actually give a slightly greater percentage of their PAC money to Republicans than WalMart does.
CC
*Along with other places that hire lots of people for unskilled labor. Fast food chains, large staffing agencies, grocery chains, etc, all have a lot of people uninsured. All of them hire lots of poor people. In general, poor people are more likely to be uninsured.
Monday, December 05, 2005
Clarifications on Wal-mart
Yep, Walmart gives primarily to Republicans. So do lots and lots of businesses. Target, for example. And Home Depot, and Macy's for a few others.
Yes, I've heard of the Walmart movie. I read in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, for example, that the hardware store owner in it who claimed he was being driven out of business by Walmart actually lost his business three months before Walmart even opened.
There's now a new small hardware store right where the old one used to be. According to the owner of the new store, they guy on the documentary's business had been floundering for years. The new store is doing well, Walmart or no.
Naturally, the filmmakers didn't mention that.
I don't understand why Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock and now the people behind this documentary think they need to lie or obscure the facts.
In most instances, I think the liberals are correct and shouldn't have to hide the truth.
I, for one, would love for poor people to be able to buy fresh vegetables from small farmers markets. In my area, however, the farmers markets are more expensive, mostly open wacky times like Wednesday mornings and none of them take foodstamps. Walmart sells fresh vegetables and sells them really cheaply.
CC
Added after theCSO's post:
I really don't get the filmmaker thing.
I mean, when Michael Moore splices parts of two different Charlton Heston speeches together to imply that he gave a really offensive speech in Colorado right after Columbine, that's straight up lying with film. (For anyone who has seen the movie, Heston said the bit about his cold, dead fingers at a speech in Charlotte a year before Columbine. Moore mixed that footage in with the Colorado footage. You can tell if you watch the tape carefully because Heston is wearing a slightly different suit and a very different tie. Moore did tape Heston's Colorado speech, but there Heston prayed for the victims and didn't say anything offensive, so Moore had to imply that he did for Heston to look as bad as Moore wanted him to.)
When Morgan Spurlock claims in his book in McDonald's that:
"Leftover bits and pieces [of dead cows] are scooped up, ground together and fed back to the cows. And then those cows are ground up and fed to you"
He provides no source for the accusation.
If he hates McDonalds so much, he should prove it. That's called "ruminant feeding" and it is way illegal and has been so for years. If he can prove it, McDonalds will face huge, huge fines. My guess? Spurlock doesn't have any proof or he would have turned McDonald's in and become the Erin-Brockovich-style folk hero he'd so clearly like to be.
A lot of Moore's and Spurlock's mistakes can be written off to bad research, which is what Moore always claims.
But I'd say both Moore's Heston thing and the Walmart folks' accidentally not telling us the real deal with the hardware store has to be intentional.
The worst part to me is, it's so lazy. Can't Moore figure out another way to get across the message that Charleton Heston is an asshat without lying? (The lie didn't fool me, and I still think he's an asshat.) Couldn't the Walmart people find another little town with a real business going under because of WalMart?
I guess lying was just easier and they assumed we'd never notice a different tie, know about the laws against ruminant feeding, or that the New York Times would send somebody to look into that hardware store. Like Howard Dean acting like the cocky kid who hasn't studied and trying to fake his way through a bible question, it just blows up in their faces every time.
I'm really starting to think Joel Monka has a point when he says that liberalism's greatest mistake is assuming people are stupid.
CC
Yes, I've heard of the Walmart movie. I read in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, for example, that the hardware store owner in it who claimed he was being driven out of business by Walmart actually lost his business three months before Walmart even opened.
There's now a new small hardware store right where the old one used to be. According to the owner of the new store, they guy on the documentary's business had been floundering for years. The new store is doing well, Walmart or no.
Naturally, the filmmakers didn't mention that.
I don't understand why Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock and now the people behind this documentary think they need to lie or obscure the facts.
In most instances, I think the liberals are correct and shouldn't have to hide the truth.
I, for one, would love for poor people to be able to buy fresh vegetables from small farmers markets. In my area, however, the farmers markets are more expensive, mostly open wacky times like Wednesday mornings and none of them take foodstamps. Walmart sells fresh vegetables and sells them really cheaply.
CC
Added after theCSO's post:
I really don't get the filmmaker thing.
I mean, when Michael Moore splices parts of two different Charlton Heston speeches together to imply that he gave a really offensive speech in Colorado right after Columbine, that's straight up lying with film. (For anyone who has seen the movie, Heston said the bit about his cold, dead fingers at a speech in Charlotte a year before Columbine. Moore mixed that footage in with the Colorado footage. You can tell if you watch the tape carefully because Heston is wearing a slightly different suit and a very different tie. Moore did tape Heston's Colorado speech, but there Heston prayed for the victims and didn't say anything offensive, so Moore had to imply that he did for Heston to look as bad as Moore wanted him to.)
When Morgan Spurlock claims in his book in McDonald's that:
"Leftover bits and pieces [of dead cows] are scooped up, ground together and fed back to the cows. And then those cows are ground up and fed to you"
He provides no source for the accusation.
If he hates McDonalds so much, he should prove it. That's called "ruminant feeding" and it is way illegal and has been so for years. If he can prove it, McDonalds will face huge, huge fines. My guess? Spurlock doesn't have any proof or he would have turned McDonald's in and become the Erin-Brockovich-style folk hero he'd so clearly like to be.
A lot of Moore's and Spurlock's mistakes can be written off to bad research, which is what Moore always claims.
But I'd say both Moore's Heston thing and the Walmart folks' accidentally not telling us the real deal with the hardware store has to be intentional.
The worst part to me is, it's so lazy. Can't Moore figure out another way to get across the message that Charleton Heston is an asshat without lying? (The lie didn't fool me, and I still think he's an asshat.) Couldn't the Walmart people find another little town with a real business going under because of WalMart?
I guess lying was just easier and they assumed we'd never notice a different tie, know about the laws against ruminant feeding, or that the New York Times would send somebody to look into that hardware store. Like Howard Dean acting like the cocky kid who hasn't studied and trying to fake his way through a bible question, it just blows up in their faces every time.
I'm really starting to think Joel Monka has a point when he says that liberalism's greatest mistake is assuming people are stupid.
CC
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