Tag Archives: Walmart

Walmart is still evil…

Well….we all know that Walmart is one of the most evil companies in the world and one of the biggest corporate welfare queens, getting almost 7 billion dollars in subsidies for it’s workers since they pay them so little they are eligible for both medicaid and food stamps; that we pay for out of our tax dollars….and they just bought themselves a tax cut that will go straight into the Walton’s pockets…but they have a new little twist they are pulling across the country at their stores….while out of one side of their mouths, Walmart continued to tell the lie that the tax cut will spur job growth…and we have to remember that has never happened from ANY tax cut the idiot repubs have tried…while out of the other side of their mouths they informed thousands of management level employees that their jobs are being eliminated…and here is the real evil kicker…the ones let go are being allowed to re-apply for the new job classification that will pay almost 30% less than the jobs they were doing….and the jobs aren’t changing at all…the ones re-hired will be doing exactly the same jobs but for 30% less than they were making…that, in my book, is just one of the most evil things I have ever seen…but what do I expect from one of the most evil corporations in the world? Geez….

More Walmart extortion….

Well…another day goes by, and we have another case of Walmart trying to extort another city into not raising it’s minimum wage. the city of Desert Hot springs California is considering raising the city’s minimum wage to $10.20 an hour with a dollar an hour increase for the next two years and then indexing it to inflation…not an unreasonable way to ensure that people make enough to eat and pay their rent. But, that’s just too much for Walmart who owns land in the city and has told the city council that if they pass the wage changes, the store will not be built…going so far at to take out a full page ad opposing the council saying that their 300 jobs would not happen if the ordinance is passed. Other than the fact that this is corporate thuggery at it’s worst…I’d say to them “good, keep your damn 300 jobs”….especially in light of the studies that have been done that find that every time a Walmart is built and opened it leads to a net loss of jobs in the community…and this has been shown all across the country…..and this goes along with other economic studies that peg the cost of each Walmart to the taxpayers of a million dollars a year….since they don’t pay enough for people to live on, most of their employees are on food stamps and Medicaid…so, I’d say to Walmart from any city across this country…keep your damn, poor paying jobs and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out….geez…

Lying liars and Walmart…

Well…over the past 6 months or so, one of the topics that has been in the news a lot is the push to get the minimum wage raised across the country…some thing that repubs and the rest of the conservatives have fought with every tool they have…and, by tools I mean lies and economists who are in the tank for business. The latest one comes from an “analysis”  of the wages at one Walmart in a North Dakota oil boom town where the shortage of labor has driven the price of labor even at Walmart to over 17 dollars an hour….and the first thing the “economist” from AEI (yep, Koch funded) says is “see, there is no need for a minimum wage if Walmart has to pay more in a tight labor market.” Now, either this PHd is stupid or he is just cherry picking numbers of one Walmart in one town to drive his political agenda…the political agenda of the Koch brothers who hate, just hate having to pay a minimum wage and have spent hundreds of millions trying to block any raise. His assertion only works in this tight labor market…in others where there is a surplus of labor, a minimum wage is needed or the surplus will drive labor cost continually down until it reaches essentially zero….now, this guy should know that…and I’m sure he does, he just doesn’t care and is lying his ass off to keep getting paid millions by the Koch’s…what a bunch of crap….

It’s welfare unless it’s for the right…

Well…not sure if you’ve been following the saga of the right wing hero rancher, Cliven Bundy, who has been in the news for his theft of almost a million dollars in grazing fees on federal land which he feels he has every right to steal since he doesn’t recognize that the federal government exists. Yeah, another one of those, these self righteous grifters on the right who feel they can just ignore any law they don’t agree with if they can profit by it. But, it gets even worse…or should I say it gets more normal for the right with the comments this idiot made this morning about “Negroes” who were better off as slaves than getting subsidies like food stamps or other parts of the safety net since getting help from the government of course takes away your incentive to work and is a bad use of tax dollars. But, he has no problem with stealing a million dollars in “rancher welfare” to allow him to keep that million dollars in profit…after all, he is entitled to it since the federal government has no right to collect those fees….just like the folks at Walmart and almost every other right wing company who pay their workers too little to live on and then watch the feds make up the balance in Medicaid and food stamps while they line their pockets with yours and my tax dollars…just what ole Cliven is doing…and just what everyone on the right supports. Grifters all…geez…

This is delicious…

Well…just read an interesting article about the continuing woes that Walmart is experiencing with drops in profit, growth, and stock price this week and the first thing that popped into my head was “couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people..” As you can tell, that last comment is full of snark and aimed at the owners of Walmart, not the people that work there and suffer everyday….it appears that shopping patterns are changing and the weekly drive to the ugly big box retailer is starting to be too big a pain for people…especially since the stuff that they are going there to buy is probably not on the shelf anyway with all of the problems Walmart has caused itself by cutting staffing and going to temp workers instead of full timers…the only thing I have to say if Walmart goes bye-bye, is good riddance…I will feel for the people that lose their jobs but allowing a profitable company like Walmart to push it’s labor costs off on the taxpayers to the tune of almost 3 billion dollars a year is just wrong…it’s just like you and me writing a check to the Waltons every month…and they don’t need more of my money….geez….

Walmart still sucks..

Well…one of the things that has been galling about watching the Olympics this time is the commercial that Walmart has been running about how wonderful they are for planning…remember, only planning to spend 250 billion dollars to ‘revive” American manufacturing….and every time I see it, I gag at the audacity of the ad…the audacity of a company who has spent the past 40 years destroying American manufacturing by their relentless push to cut costs by selling billions and billions of dollars of cheap Chinese crap…all the while paying their employees so little that most of them qualify for food stamps and other aid that has we taxpayers giving Walmart almost a million dollars a store in subsidies. It reminds me of the old, old joke that has a murderer killing his parents and then throwing himself on the mercy of the court by saying he has an excuse, he is an orphan….that is just what this whole campaign smells like…hollow out the economy with your strategic plans, then make a big deal that you might go back and fix some of the damage that you caused…what a sorry excuse for a company, and a sorry excuse for Americans these Waltons are…geez…

Bad, bad Walmart….

Well..I don’t want you to think that the only thing I can write about is Walmart, but the terrible, terrible company is starting to have it’s methods exposed and it is being held responsible for them. The latest of their cringe inducing tactics to underpay and control their employees has come to the attention of the NLRB who is bringing legal action for the company’s thug-like tactics in trying to prevent their employees from organizing to get better working conditions; which is their right here in the US…but not if you hear the right talk about it…according to the right, this organizing is either communism, socialism, or an affront to the owners of Walmart who should be able to suck 3.5 billion dollars out of yours and my pockets in subsidies to their employees….it is their right as part of the 1%. So, finally, the government is saying enough to this kind of crap…but the thing I just can’t understand is the bleating from working people on the right attacking their friends and neighbors who just want to be fairly compensated for their labor….the brainwashing of the working poor on the right is one of the things I just can’t understand…they will consistently vote for people who continue to steal from them and then make sure that everyone else gets taken by the 1%, too….what happened to pride in intelligence? Doesn’t exist on the right anymore…geez…

Can Walmart get any more tone deaf?

Well…if you follow the news at all, you’ve seen the veneer start to crack on the supposedly wonderful company Walmart over the past year or so, exposing the just awful employee policies the company has…and the amount of subsidies that the American people give to each and every store (over a million dollars a year per store, 3.5 billion dollars total). But now, it has even gotten worse…with a store in Ohio setting up a food donation area in an employee lounge so workers can donate food so other workers will have a Thanksgiving dinner…yep, you heard it right…Walmart wants its poorly paid employees to subsidize even worse paid ones so they don’t go hungry. There is so much wrong with this I don’t know where to start…if Walmart was so damn concerned that it’s full time employees don’t make enough money to buy food without food stamps (and it’s not…it’s a policy they support), why not just pay them more? Or, buy every employee Thanksgiving dinner? But, even with the countless billions of dollars in profit they make every year, they won’t pry even a few extra dollars out of their grasping hands to make sure their employees don’t starve….what a poor excuse for a company…and the reason I will never set foot in one….geez…

Another reason to hate Walmart…

Well…just a shorty on the jaw dropping stupidity that is the management of a Walmart here in Michigan who fired an employee for getting into a fight with some men who were assaulting a woman in a Walmart parking lot…and their reason? That they have a zero-tolerance policy for workplace violence….so, this guy is supposed to just leave this woman being attacked to keep his job? What a stupid, nasty company Walmart is…I’ve got nothing more to say…geez…

Walmart…part two…

Well…have been thinking about this more this aft and have come up with an even simpler solution…every company in the US that pays wages so low that their employees have to have government assistance of any kind should be required to pay the assistance back as a sort of tax to take away the incentive to cheat their employees out of a living wage while enriching the owners. This would be classic economics at work and since the repubs are so hot about eliminating government assistance for anyone, how could they disagree? It’s all a a matter of eliminating the distortions in markets that are cause by a big company like Walmart and it’s political power…Walmart is essentially stealing from you and me and so the Waltons can get richer and richer…it would at least claw back the 3.5 billion dollars in silent subsidies that come from their employees being eligible for Medicaid and food stamps and stop the greedy Waltons from pushing these costs onto you and me…geez…