The American dream is alive at Wal-Mart

As a bleeding-heart liberal living in the northeastern United States, I always suspected that Wal-Mart sucked. I didn't realize how much it sucked until seeing the documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.

Everything you'd suspect about Wal-Mart is true: the union-busting, the lack of adequate benefits for employees (which ends up costing taxpayers bilions of dollars when employees go on federal assistance programs, by the way), the relentless steamrolling of local and family companies, and on and on and on. But the part that affected me the most was an interview with the former Global Services Operations Manager, who had worked with the company for many years. "I probably led more Wal-Mart cheers than anyone," he said. "If you cut me, I'd have bled Wal-Mart blue." He described visiting factories overseas to enforce health and safety standards and weeping when he returned to his hotel room as he considered what he had witnessed. Then he described making his reports to Wal-Mart's corporate offices, confident that they would want to change course and do the right thing. He says:

"When I went in and started reporting factory violations, during the certification process, I didn't know that we weren't going to make it the goal to correct the violations. I didn't think that any retaliation would be brought against me for doing my job." He gets a sad look on his face. "Now I realize that I was pretty naive."

Yup, he got canned.

At the end of the film, there is a scrolling list of communities that have rejected Wal-Marts. And one of them is Queens, New York! Yeah baby. We put up with a lot of shit in Queens, but we will not put up with a Wal-Mart.

Also: If your grandmother is anything like my grandmother, she is always forwarding you ominous e-mails about young ladies like yourself being abducted in parking lots. You probably thought these were just grandmotherly urban legends. But apparently this is something that happens all the time at Wal-Mart!