Down and Out in Discount America

I don't know how many of you read The Nation but, it is always full of great and logical perspective. The last 10 years has been a real education for me and I find regressive viewpoints by the anti-worker scum a total no brainer when it comes to knowing the facts and reading spin by the right-wing. Were it not for the sheeple of this country, any journalistic attempt by the right would find it shelved in the comic book section of your favorite bookstore.
Therefore, we must, at the very least, attempt to educate those we see as hopeless.

Down and Out in Discount America
by Liza Featherstone


This article is adapted from Liza Featherstone's Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart (Basic).
On the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest shopping day of the year, Wal-Mart's many progressive critics--not to mention its business competitors--finally enjoyed a bit of schadenfreude when the retailer had to admit to "disappointing" sales. The problem was quickly revealed: Wal-Mart hadn't been discounting aggressively enough. Without low prices, Wal-Mart just isn't Wal-Mart.

That's not a mistake the big-box behemoth is likely to make again. Wal-Mart knows its customers, and it knows how badly they need the discounts. Like Wal-Mart's workers, its customers are overwhelmingly female, and struggling to make ends meet. Betty Dukes, the lead plaintiff in Dukes v. Wal-Mart, the landmark sex-discrimination case against the company, points out that Wal-Mart takes out ads in her local paper the same day the community's poorest citizens collect their welfare checks. "They are promoting themselves to low-income people," she says. "That's who they lure. They don't lure the rich.... They understand the economy of America. They know the haves and have-nots. They don't put Wal-Mart in Piedmonts. They don't put Wal-Mart in those high-end parts of the community. They plant themselves right in the middle of Poorville." More>>>