Evil Wal-Mart Greeter Tries To Force People To Have A Nice Day
Writer Charles Platt goes undercover at a Wal-Mart in Flagstaff, AZ and makes some pretty interesting observations;
Getting hired turned out to be a challenge. The personnel manager told me she had received more than 100 applications during that month alone, chasing just a handful of jobs. Thus the mystery deepened. If Wal-Mart was such an exploiter of the working poor, why were the working poor so eager to be exploited? And after they were hired, why did they seem so happy to be there? Anytime I shopped at the store, blue-clad Walmartians encouraged me to “Have a nice day” with the sincerity of the pope issuing a benediction.
On average, anyone walking into Wal-Mart is likely to spend more than $200,000 at the store during the rest of his life. Therefore, any clueless employee who alienates that customer will cost the store around a quarter-million dollars. “If we don’t remember that our customers are in charge,” our trainer warned us, “we turn into Kmart.” She made that sound like devolving into some lesser being - a toad, maybe, or an ameba.
Contrast this with the vague, inaccurate bile spilled on the wakeupwalmart site, owned by the UFCW;
This summer, Wal-Mart has organized mandatory meetings across the country, all with one purpose: to intimidate rank-and-file employees into voting Republican. The company’s workers have been forced to attend ideologically-charged, Wal-Mart-sponsored rants against Democrats, Barack Obama, and landmark legislation that would make it easier for workers to vote for or against representation.
Um, that would be the “Employee Free Choice Act“, a law that if passed Obama has indicated he would sign. This law would eliminate secret ballots for authorizing a union in a workplace and invite outright intimidation, coercion, manipulation, and force. “Free Choice” indeed - sign or else is more like it. What employer in his or her right mind wouldn’t try to convince his employees to oppose this?
(link from Citizen X, photo from some random anti-Wal-Mart site)
That’s bizarre! I thought that the way to become the world’s largest company is by being evil.
I don’t understand the general public’s hypocracy with this type of issue. The “American Way” is to work hard and become successful. When someone like Sam Walton does this, he is pointed at as all that is wrong with America.
Where I live, we only have a K-Mart, and because there has been no direct compitition, the store is a joke. The management obviously knows there is no other place to shop, so the customers are treated accordingly. We are deperately waiting for our WalMart Supercenter to arrive, and do K-Mart in. That’s the American Way.