Walmart Corporate from Bentonville, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, passes along the keeper’s observation that Walmart is apparently having difficulty recruiting pallbearers for its own retail funeral, judging from the lack of staffing at a store where the keeper stood in a long line to buy some foreign-made unnecessity.
The chatter in that long line reflected no sympathy for the retail giant that destroyed the warm community character of small-town America by using the populace’s inherent cheapness as bait.
There was, among the Walmart line members, a subliminal sense of resentment at having been manipulated by the Arkansas corporation, even now as its big-box stores become retail funeral parlors in the face of internet shopping with its scurrying delivery trucks on every corner.
Retail shopping, that once included a personal relationship with an accommodating clerk or proprietor, and the opportunity to examine the merchandise, is now only an impersonal computer click, along with return instructions; and during that unfortunate transition, the big ugly Walmart stores were nothing but temporary accommodating structures, similar in some ways to the houses of ill repute on the western frontier.
No! Walmart, even to postpone its big-box funerals, wouldn’t go there would it!
