The Meaning of Life, and Other Weighty Matters...

I was catching up on some of my email, and reading some stories on Alternet, and came upon an article about everyone's favorite loved/hated store. I've got a Walmart Supercenter close to my workplace. That makes it very convenient to stop by after a shift ends, but I feel guilty whenever I do stop, because I know what a behemoth it is. That fact makes America's #1 retailer blatant about short-changing its employees and disregarding common decency along with labor law. This article is one small example.

I laughed my tail off at a $100,000-and-change fine for Walmart. You can read for yourself in the article just how much time that equals for this beast of a store. It reminds me of what my grandmother used to tell us about the company stores in the mining towns of N.E. Pennsylvania, that the miners and their families were so beholden to these company stores that they were always in debt to them. Or another apt comparison might be to the state-run stores in the old Soviet Union. It sure seems like Walmart is the lifeblood of the State here in the U.S., and they sure do seem to have plenty of influence.