Just in time for Labor Day, Globe fluff piece brags about life as a Wal-Mart employee

Editorial by Matt Marquardt –

Someone pointed out to me an article that appeared in Sunday’s Globe, where, along with a handful of other businesses, the Globe Gazette “saluted” the Wal-Mart Super Center as a pillar of the community.

Inside the mini-magazine, some hack from the Globe – I suspect John Skipper, who will write anything his corporate masters tell him to write as long as he gets to keep his job – wrote about the “success” of the Mason City Wal-Mart. It is a glowing, over-the-top account of the store and the history of its move west from its original location. Most of the article references and quotes an employee who seems to think that working for Wal-Mart is some kind of dream job and then lists all the great benefits – “401K, medical, dental, vacation, disability, stock purchases and employee discounts” a worker would receive once hired by the behemoth retailer.

Other lines the Globe published that slathered praise upon the Mason City Wal-Mart include “Wal-Mart’s future is bright”, “the company is booming”, “employees are prouder than ever”, “Wal-Mart has treated me right” and “you can raise a family on what Wal-Mart pays.”

I think whoever wrote that story has drank a few too many Moscow Mules or toked on a few too many doobies.

In my opinion, Wal-Mart sucks. Plain and simple. Blunt enough for you?  The only ones prospering from Wal-Mart is the Walton family.  Certainly not the community of Mason City.

To me, the store is dirty, it is dark, and the prices are not lower than merchandise for sale at Hy-Vee and Target. It is a haven for crime and it sucks the energy out of our police and emergency responders; and it is never questioned or held accountable for it.  The employees seem to be … well, to put it delicately, I think the ones I have seen are not exactly enjoying themselves and seem slightly less than overjoyed about their predicament as a Wal-Mart worker (can you really come to work at Wal-Mart dressed in Goth with a blue smock on top of your costume?).  My sources tell me that it is very difficult to attain full-time employment there, and it takes full-time status to get all the “perks” mentioned above.  The Globe left that out of its fluff piece; see, the Globe is pure propaganda and loves to lead the sheeple to its watering hole, especially if it can sell an ad out of the deal.  Wal-Mart hires mostly part-timers, not full-timers. The folks I know that have worked there never left their jobs with a good taste in their mouths. I believe Wal-Mart hires people, works them hard and leads them on with talk of promotion, then churns them up and spits them out its tail pipe. The Globe forgot to write about how Wal-Mart  has been sued countless times for cheating its employees and is universally known for paying crappy wages.  Many communities have fought tooth-and-nail too keep Wal-Mart out altogether.  Oops, the truth didn’t fit, so the Globe hacks ignored it, as usual.  This is not a good place to work, and for the Globe to publish the garbage that it did, the day before Labor Day, is more proof that it has sold out to the highest bidder and a slap in the face to working-class people who believe in fair compensation for an honest day’s work.

Yes you will find someone working for Wal-Mart that is drinking the billionaire Walton kool-aid, who will say all the right things, and may, just may, think that the right boss will read her words and a 15 cent an hour raise will grace her paycheck because of it.   The Globe did just that in this case, using one current employees’s self-proclaimed Shangri-la career as a shelf-stocker to build its case and  attempt to prove its mis-guided theory that Wal-Mart is a wonderful place to shop and work.  Well, bravo to the Globe for digging deep enough to pull that off and fool a few sheeple and satisfy its advertiser.

A fluff piece by the Globe doesn’t change the realities of what Wal-Mart is and its truly negative impacts on most communities it has infiltrated.