"That's the Wal-Mart Way" [View all]

Working from home today, TV on in the background, and I notice I am getting a steady dose of Wal-Mart propaganda about how wonderful they are. It's the holiday season and they're not hawking a thing but how incredible their workplace is for their marvelous employees, who are depicted as grinning from ear to ear about all the glorious opportunities they have.

Yeah, right.

There's a Wal-Mart Supercenter right up the road from me. Whenever I go in there the employees look like they've just been run over by the squeegee machine. The few desultory cashiers they have can't even keep a water bottle by their registers. It's that pathetic. Even on a busy Saturday you're lucky to find a handful of checkers. Why? Because they're largely being replaced with self-checkout machines.

If the objective is to eliminate workers by replacing them with robots (oh, and we know it is), why don't you start at the top? I'm sure your CEO could be replaced with a HAL 9000...