Yuck!
I was talking about this picture with Julie over the weekend. Isn’t it disgusting? People in china drink that stuff. Talk about living in the industrial revolution.
This story is interesting. Julie and I went to Wal*Mart this weekend. And it was as horrible and as ugly as I remember. They’re currently in the process of converting it to a Super Walmart, but it was pretty much the same ugly it always was. If anything the construction was the most effecient, attractive thing going on.
The “greeter” stopped us coming in and asked if we had returns. We answered yes, and he had to rummage around and affix stickers to our items. Even though we were literally 10 feet away from the returns desk. Do they have that much graft in 10 feet?
We were there buying towels and we found what we needed. And ogled all the crap we couldn’t possibly ever need. The one bright spot was that we did have an awesome employee check us out. They have little bells like the kind a school teacher would have at each check out. If you get great service you can ring the bell. I don’t know if there’s someone tallying the bell rings, but it is kind of interesting. You could probably choose which line you wanted to get in by the amount of bell ringing going on ahead of you. The women who checked us out was getting enthusiastic ringing from every person who went through her line.
But that article brings up an interesting point. I say all the time that I want to support companies that do these sorts of things. And yet I keep going to Target. Target has announced nothing green to my knowledge. They’re just selling slightly more attractive Chinese crap, at slightly fewer stores and taking no responsibility for what they’re doing. Wal*Mart’s definitely on the right track. I guess I should just suck up my love of aesthetics and buy my household staples there.
Comments
SMashley
2007-05-14T19:56:48.000Z
I read today that Target is one of the few big box retailers making no effort to eliminate PVC in their plastic products. Walmart is making that effort. I still wont shop there. At this point I dont shop at either one really. There isnt a target close by that I would step foot in.
mcoker (http://www.duderonomy.com)
2007-05-14T20:11:43.000Z
That’s awesome. I have an insane hatred for Wal-Mart, too. It’s funny, I describe it as a place where all the poor, fat people go to beat their kids. I only go if I have to… and with the exception of this weekend, I hadn’t been in a Target in nearly a year or so. I basically see it as the same shit/different store, more expensive and without as many poor people beatin’ their kids.
Jooley Ann (www.julieholden.com)
2007-05-15T02:07:33.000Z
There’s even more about WalMart going “green” in this article. It’s a looong article, and the green stuff is on pp. 5-6 (of 6), but the entire thing is worth a read IMO. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/02/070402fa\_fact\_goldberg One quote: “As part of the green campaign, Wal-Mart has committed itself to cutting the fuel consumption of its truck fleet, the second-largest in America, and to reducing its electricity bill—Wal-Mart is one of the largest private consumers of electricity in the world—by twenty per cent in the next five years. Dach arranged for me to visit a recently opened Supercenter near Bentonville that was built to conserve energy. For any number of reasons, this Wal-Mart seemed different from other Wal-Marts I’d been to. The prices were still low, but the workers appeared to be more enthusiastic, and I was impressed, in particular, by the store’s environmental innovations. Skylights allowed so much natural illumination that the fluorescent lights were switched off. The lights in the vast freezers were controlled by motion sensors, so they switched on only if someone walked nearby. “In this store alone, we’ll save more than a hundred thousand dollars in electricity this year,” Charles Zimmerman, a Wal-Mart vice-president who showed me around, said. “What we’re trying to do is make sustainability sustainable,” Dach said.” And yet…ehhhh…I *still* hate WalMart…!
