George Carlin must have hated Wal-Mart. [Like most of Carlin’s work, this clip is not family-friendly:]

I wanted to feel the blogger at Blogaholic’s pain, I really did. His long tale of woe in dealing with buying contact lenses at Wal-Mart started the rage rising in my gut. He was well and truly fecked by customer service from hell. Then I read this: But, honestly, they’re the cheapest for my very […]

Rand, old buddy, you were in Colorado and you didn’t drop by? I’m disappointed. However, Lisa Everitt from BNET did see Rand Waddoups, Wal-Mart’s former salty snack buyer turned sustainability guru, in Boulder and she paraphrases him this way: Because of this, consumers as well as retailers must push for transparency of the supply chain, […]

That’s a hard title to earn, but Jeffrey Goldberg thinks he’s found it (or at least one in the top 500). My favorite line from Goldberg’s post: Wal-Mart has built a perfect system for the maintenance of the permanent underclass. I think that’s good enough to go at the top of this blog. What do […]

Of course government is going to fail at its job if you starve it of tax revenue and systematically destroy oversight. Besides, do you really want the Waltons to control everything?

In the day-in-and-day-out work of posting to The Writing On The Wal (1,366 posts for me, a total of 3,935 for the team across more than three years) it may seem that we lose sight of the bigger picture of why we do what we do. Reading about Andrei Cherny’s The Candy Bombers, reminded me. […]

There are sound stages on Hollywood’s back lots smaller than Bentonvile’s behemoth’s, so it’s no surprise that budding video talent has been sneaking cameras in at odd hours. And now for the midnight show at the Wally Plex featuring tellmehowivelostyou. Jeff Hess: Have Coffee Will Write.

I’m currently kicking myself for not figuring this out earlier. From an absolute must-read-the-whole-thing by Al Norman at the Huffington Post: Beginning January 1, 2006, the entire drug importation issue changed dramatically with the implementation of Medicare Part D by Congress. Talk of Canadian imports all but disappeared from the media. Within 9 months of […]

Here’s an e-mail sent to the Consumerist: So the brand name is “Genuine Steakhouse,” therefore they are Genuine Steakhouse Steaks. This does not mean anything. They are not “genuine” anything, nor are they coming from a “steakhouse,” except for, I guess the slaughterhouse, which is a house where steaks come from. The next sentence, “100% […]

Top executives move around among corporate jobs like water skeeters on a creek in July, but it’s not good when a vice president in charge of a new risky venture for a company decides to leave the country to take a better job. From Supermarket News: David Wild, who was said to be heading up […]

During the past year we’ve written about the coming of in-store healthcare clinics like Take Care, Quick Health, Quick Care and Smart Care. The concept seems good, but the execution has not been what the clincs or Wal-Mart had hoped it would be. Wal-Mart had talked about 400 clinics by 2010. That number may be […]

If you ever get sick, hit by a truck or, in fact, became a financial liability to Wal-Mart in any way, your employer will abandon you so fast it will make your head swim (as the cases of Debbie Shank, Herm Teague – heck, even Tom Coughlin – clearly demonstrate). PS Those of you who […]

After reading this latest recall notice from U.S. Product Safety Commission I have to begin to wonder if China isn’t being cheap and stupid by shipping us products contaminated with lead, but is rather using Wal-Mart to ship all of its toxic materials out of the country. (OK, no, I don’t really believe that, but […]

So Ben Stansfield gets detained while this guy saunters out the door?

Wal-Mart buys so much shrimp and fish, that if the company changes how it does its buying, there could be considerable impact on improving the environment where shrimp farms operate — from Central America to Asia — and on improving the health and sustainability of devastated wild fish stocks. – Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect, […]