Double Flee A

We all know that Wal-Mart, by effectively being the world's largest middleman, is also the world's largest manufacturer. The invisible hand of Adam Smith has many millions of Chinese in a choke-hold, and that's fairly well understood.

I haven't seen Robert Greenwald's (blah blah) new Wal-Mart documentary and have no plans to, but I would be surprised if it touched on an incredibly important part of the Wal-Mart equation, the one that more than any other makes it popular with its shoppers, and a feature that unites them with the unsavory element in people I loathe more than almost any other, which is that people like to feel powerful, and when they get a taste, become very attached to feeling that way on a regular basis. Wal-Mart regularly provides people with this feeling of having (buying) power, and no one else can give them that on any comparable scale.

I heard once that whenever you get something for nothing, someone somewhere is getting nothing for something. And that's the feeling, which I justify being attached to because it is an empathic one, I get when I think about "always low prices", and always people living in squalor to provide Wal-Mart shoppers with disposable products.

To me Wal-Mart is the epitome of a cheap holiday in someone else's misery, which is why I won't be tainting the gifts I buy people for Chistmas (or anything else, ever) from them. There is a great injustice being perpetrated by Wal-Mart, and the only way to make it stop is at the check-out counters, which is never going to happen, no matter how many documentaries Robert Greenwald makes.

posted by dale @ 3:19 PM