Ignorance of Walmart starts with the Mayor

There’s been much gnashing of teeth about the evils of Walmart opening earlier on Thanksgiving to get a jump start on Christmas shopping season. Walmart joins other retailers in opening earlier on Thanksgiving but it wouldn’t do to picket and kvetch at Toys R Us for instance, I mean, how would it look to the kids? The media would call you scrooges! So Walmart it is.

Walmart’s a much easier target to demonize anyway. It’s BIG and SUCCESSFUL and NON UNION–just like the other companies, but Walmart is the biggest.  Besides, the left has been going after Walmart for years. It’s familiar territory. That’s why the left plans to protest and disrupt the big Black Friday sales at Walmart.

Note the Adopt a Starving Picketer Program

The former Deaniacs and Clintonistas who have helped the unions with messaging against Walmart have been at this for going on a decade. An entire google page of anti Walmart websites reflect the success of the campaign, starting with WakeUpWalmart to WalmartWatch (which has morphed into the friendlier sounding Obama tinged “Making Change at Walmart” and uses “Our Walmart” as a new messaging tool. The unions are big at claiming ownership of stuff using the word “Our” such as “Our Oregon.”) 

Sales Associate or Shopper?

The Liberatti have mocked shoppers and their wild outfits, obesity and questionable class by featuring them in all their hidden-camera horribleness in the People of Walmart  in hopes it will make it easier to block new stores (Ew, I don’t want THOSE people in MY neighborhood!).

I don’t see them going after Hollywood after another tiresome issue of Stars Without Make Up! but when has hypocrisy made these folks take pause? 

In fact, hatred of Walmart bundles together many of the left’s fondest issues: unionization, anti sprawl-smart growth obsessions and their obesity cat calling. They overlay it all with an arrogance best displayed when supposedly smart, urbane ABC Newser Charles Gibson literally looked down his nose at Sarah Palin and accused of her not knowing something (in this case The Bush Doctrine)–take that you white trash Alaskan hick! Palin was right, of course, but does anybody remember?

Speaking of the ‘we know better than you crowd,’ if you have a moment to go here and listen (22:37) to the head of the Walmart rabble rousers in Portland, Occupy Portland’s Jesse Sponberg, you’ll find the heart of the problem. In his breathtaking arrogance, Sponberg claims nobody really wants to work at Walmart. It’s a crummy job, not a career. Those jobs aren’t good enough. 
This from a man whom I don’t believe is currently employed (unless you include his erstwhile rap career) living in a state where the U-6 unemployment hovers routinely between 16%-17%.  

• Walmart pays its basic “sales associates” in Oregon an average hourly wage of $13.04.
• Walmart has five basic health insurance plans, the cheapest of which costs $15 per pay period per employee. Like most businesses, the plans do not cover some part time employees.
• Walmart saves families who buy $100 of groceries there every week an average of $700 per year.
• Walmart employs 1.3 million people, 250,000 of whom have been there for ten years or longer. 75% of managers started as hourly employees. If Walmart’s so awful, why do they stay?

The anti Walmart street theater performers who plan on blocking shoppers, riding bikes, breaking into flash mob routines and who knows what else don’t want you to spoil your Thanksgiving by going shopping and buying ‘stuff.’

That’s why they plan to skip their Thanksgiving–where they weren’t planning to give any thanks at all anyway–and will attempt to ruin the way you’ve chosen to spend yours.