Wal*Mart

D-bags want a variety of goods sold at low prices in a friendly atmosphere. If that means waiting in traffic for an hour to get off the interstate, and skulking around the parking lot for another thirty minutes trying to get a spot within a stone’s throw of the door so you’re not too tired from walking to shop, so be it. Once inside the glow of instant consumer gratification, there is a Rascal waiting to chauffeur you around like a princess.

Like so many other things that d-bags enjoy, it’s not the brainless simplicity of buying cheap crap to stuff your house with that makes us love Wal*Mart, it’s the experience behind the cheap crap that warms a d-bag’s heart in the cold night of globalization.

Just the facts Ma’am!

1) Sam Walton opened a Ben Franklin Department Store franchise in Bentonville, Arkansas in 1945, but called it “Walton’s Five and Dime” to prove he had that spark of American entrepreneurship that has always said, “I deserve it.” By 1962 he owned his own store, and by 2008 his heirs and shareholders were netting 12.88 billion dollars every year!

2) In 2001, the average wage for a Wal-Mart Sales Clerk was $8.23 per hour, or $13,861 a year, while the federal poverty line for a family of three was $14,630. The company has hired low-skilled workers since its inception. Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton once said, “I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We’re going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment.”

3) A class action lawsuit in Missouri asserted approximately 160,000 to 200,000 people who were forced to work off-the-clock, were denied overtime pay, or were not allowed to take rest and lunch breaks. In 2000, Wal-Mart paid $50 million to settle a class-action suit that asserted that 69,000 current and former Wal-Mart employees in Colorado had been forced to work off-the-clock. The company has also faced similar lawsuits in other states, including Pennsylvania and Oregon.

4) In 1995, Chinese dissident Harry Wu charged that Wal-Mart was contracting prison labor in Guangdong Province. There have also been reports of teenagers in Bangladesh working in sweatshops 80 hours per week at $0.14 per hour, for a Wal-Mart supplier Beximco. In 1994, Guatemalan Wendy Diaz reported that she had been working for Wal-Mart at $0.30 per hour at age 13.

If you think these facts are cause for alarm, you are obviously not a d-bag. Rather, for a d-bag these facts are the secret source of pleasure that informs every d-bag purchase. Let’s start from the other side of the argument for a little perspective.

D-bag Love

Renowned social scientists Penn & Teller devoted an episode of their weekly lecture to an analysis of Wal-Mart criticism as a social movement. They theorized that despite the noble rhetoric, the real motivation of “Wal-Mart haters” was rooted in class resentment. They suggested that hating Wal-Mart permits a person “to feel better about themselves” for three main reasons: They “don’t run a greedy international conglomerate”; they aren’t Wal-Mart workers, who are widely considered “low-skilled, minimum wage drones”; and they aren’t Wal-Mart customers, whom they think of as “toothless, welfare-getting hillbillies.” The only flaw in this argument is implied by the equivocations “widely considered” and “whom they think of.”

Despite being a a thrice demonstrable fact that Wal-Mart associates are almost exclusively working poor and that “more than one-fifth of Wal-Mart’s customers have no bank accounts, which would be about twice the national rate, according to the Federal Reserve” (that’s 20 million Americans, and the source article is from a conservative news source), Penn wants to distance himself from the haters. His equivocations would have us believe that he is above personal hatreds. But he’s not and neither are we — and that’s the point! No matter how poor, uneducated, superstitious, proud, angry, malevolent, violent, arrogant, cringing and mean you are, when you shop at Wal-Mart you can always feel good because the stuff you buy is too expensive for a d-bag farther down the supply chain. D-bags enjoy knowing that they participate — in however small a way — in a mighty force: global capitalism. Whether that be through the U. S. military, the RAND corporation, Wal-Mart or GTA IV doesn’t matter. When a d-bag shops at Wal-Mart he leaves the working world where he is just another wage slave and enters the consumer world where he is the master of all the goods he surveys.