MORFORD: Can You Still Hate Wal-Mart?

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | 5/24/6 | Mark Morford

[SmithL]

It's a shockingly eco-friendly plan from the world's most toxic retailer. Did hell just freeze over?

Sometimes you just have to let the possibility breathe.

Sometimes you just have to allow that something grand and good and healthy might actually be born from the bowels of the dank and ravenous megacorporate world, like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes, even if it comes right alongside the nastiest, most abusive federal environmental policy you will see in your lifetime.

Take Wal-Mart, the most famously offensive, town-destroying, junk-purveying, labor-abusing, sweatshop-supporting, American-job-killing, soul-numbing, seizure-inducing, hope-curdling retailer in the known universe (just ask the fine local town of Hercules), moving upward of $300 billion in cheap mass-produced slurm every year via nearly 5,000 landscape-mauling eyesore stores stretching all the way from Texas to China and Argentina and South Korea and Mexico and your backyard, with U.S. stores accounting for fully 8 percent of all retail sales in our entire nation.

There has been, to date, very little good to say about this most voracious and powerful of low-end, trashy retailers, and certainly nothing from anyone even remotely concerned with the health of the planet and of the attuned consumers who inhabit it. Wal-Mart has always been, quite appropriately, the devil.

Until now. As juicy and warmhearted eco-blog Treehugger mentions in its latest Wal-Mart roundup (and as the New York Times later discussed in its huge "Business of Green" section last week), it seems that back in October, Wal-Mart's president, Lee Scott, delivered a "secret" speech to employees about "21st Century Leadership," in which he outlined . . . agenda items to help ensure the future health of the world's biggest shopping hell.

[SmithL]

Morfordite Alert

`nuff said!

[Disambiguator]

Wow. 4 full paragraphs without a single reference to anal sex!

[atomicpossum]

Such obvious snobbery against WalMart and those who shop there. Apparently these libs feel we should shop at overpriced boutiques, paying inflated prices for designer gear created by fussy homosexual designers in urban lofts.

[MarxSux]

Morford. Panties. Knot.

[50sDad]

Wow. 4 full paragraphs without a single reference to anal sex!

However, I have to note it has possibly the highest "hyphenated hate word-to-paragraph" ratio of any LibSpeak I have ever read.

[Disambiguator]

Yes, Morford is the master of the breathless run-on sentence that contains many juvenile-sounding adjectives and makes you wonder what kind of grades he made in English classes in school.

[theFIRMbss]

>4 full paragraphs without a single reference to anal sex

"... you just have to allow that something grand and good and healthy might actually be born from the bowels of the dank and ravenous ..."

[Disambiguator]

That's a bit of a stretch.

:^)

[MNnice]

The whole Walmart "debate" really exposes the left's priorities and concerns. Never mind that Walmart enables the poor person's dollar to stretch farther or the fact that they offer jobs where none existed before, they're still evil incarnate because they reject the unionists. I love shoving these facts into my leftist acquaintances' faces and watch them fumble for words.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Such obvious snobbery against WalMart and those who shop there.

Actually, it transcends snobbery and enters the realm of bigotry.

[Winston Smith]

I would SWEAR that everyone from SF is absolutely NUTZ. If someone lives there and help me find ONE normal (conservative.)
I read news from SF and always shake my head in wonder at the stupidity.

[Socratic]

And I thought it was just a store. (Slaps forehead).

[sockmonkey]

Good Grief that Morfordite is full of himself, and what he's full of is excrement (IMHO).

Of course, I am one of those lowlife dupes who is addicted to Walmart because I can buy groceries, hardware, pet food, clothes, and about anything else for at least a third less than the other retailers around here.

[Socratic]

I would SWEAR that everyone from SF is absolutely NUTZ.

I blame it on the Rice-a-Roni. There's GOT to be something in that SF treat.

[TheSpottedOwl]

Well, maybe I'll start hating WalMart a little less. Morford is a yutz as usual.

[MNnice]

and about anything else for at least a third less than the other retailers around here.

One of the reasons the Left hates Wal-Mart is because their success is the epitome of how the free market works. 

[Mr. Jeeves]

Such obvious snobbery against WalMart and those who shop there.

Well, here in the Bay Area, the very few WalMarts that exist are primarily patronized by poor blacks and Hispanics...so Morford is actually looking down upon the Democrat voting base, not the stereotypical Bible Belt fundamentalists he likes to satirize.

[LadyNavyVet]

I also like Walmart for the one-stop shopping. Saves gas. Aren't the greenies always telling us to save gas?

[SmithL]

For something a little different from the San Francisco Chronicle, check out Cinnamon Stillwell's "The Making Of A 9/11 Republican".

[Mrs. Shawnlaw]

If WalMart's world headquarters were somewhere other than Arkansas, and founded by someone NOT from Arkansas, they wouldn't hate them so much.
Its ALL bigotry!