Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Those bathrooms are killers

Wal-Mart has something of a bad reputation. Not only are the megastores practically synonymous with driving out smaller local shops while paying workers less than a livable wage, they are seen as the embodiment of evil for many. How any store that places its hunting equipment just a few aisles over from it's bicycles and toys could be seen as evil is beyond us, but, well, plenty of people seem to jump all over Wal-Mart when they're talking about the evils of consumerism and the corporate culture.

Take, for instance, a woman who wrote a letter to Wal-Mart. She's upset that she hasn't gotten a response yet. Of course, the letter was written shortly after an incident in August, and she wants to know why it took a janitor 9+ hours to find the body of her husband, but we can't expect that any major corporation is just going to freely hand that information over. Especially with the highly competitive nature of so many of these corporations.

Look at it this way. Wal-Mart doesn't blatantly explain how they can sell DVDs for $29, or TVs for a nickel. Sure, a lot of people can assume that it's a combination of substandard quality coupled with low wage overhead, but we can't be certain. When it comes to determining how a janitor could completely miss a dead body for so many hours, sure, one could guess that the root cause was a combination of lack of training and overall laziness (possibly caused by wage strife). And it's not like Wal-Mart is being considered responsible for the death itself. If they were, you can practically bet that some of these other "big box" stores would be crawling all over themselves to see which one could be responsible for the next corpse left undiscovered for a double shift.

Seriously? Wal-Mart isn't responding to this situation? What, are they afraid that they somehow might look worse than they already do? There's really only one way for that to happen.

They could hire the current administration in customer service positions.

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