Happy Fun Facts for all you "bargain" hunter

[SmoothedShredder]

Gandhi would be pissed:

• Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the world and the richest company in the world.

• 5000 stores worldwide in 10 countries

• 256 stores across Canada employing over 60,000 employees

• 5 of the richest 13 people in the world are members of the Walton family.

• 28 hours a week is considered fulltime work at Wal-Mart.

• Wal-Mart’s highest paid executive earns more money in one day than a Wal-Mart cashier earns in 4 years.

• 2/3 of Wal-Mart’s workers cannot participate in its health insurance plan because of its high cost and huge deductibles.

• Wal-Mart employees in the U.S. had to sue to collect the overtime pay that they had earned.

• Wal-Mart’s female employees, in every job category, have been paid less than their male counterparts each year since 1997. The biggest class-action lawsuit (1.5 million women) in U.S. history is underway against Wal-Mart for this systemic discrimination against women.

• Wal-Mart has been cited more than 40 times by the National Labour Relations Board for using illegal tactics (such as threats and firings) to deny its workers the right to have a union.

• Wal-Mart workers in Jonquiere, Quebec successfully organized their workplace through the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Union. Wal-Mart’s response was to close the store. 200 workers lost their jobs.

• Wal-Mart challenged Saskatchewan labour laws, citing that their rights under the charter were being infringed upon after refusing to provide the Saskatchewan Labour Board with internal documents on training management how to remain union-free.

• Wal-Mart has been found guilty 4 times in Canada for unfair labour practices for intimidating and harassing workers during an organizing campaign.

• In Ontario Wal-Mart was fined $500,000 for failing to report workplace accidents and injuries.

[Davey Boy 2.0]

revolting. nauseating.

[Kaidy Mae]

I read in How Wal-Mart is Destoying America...and the World that there are between 8,000 and 10,000 lawsuits going on against Wal-Mart at any given time in the US. If they dropped their frickin' lawyers and just started paying people what they deserve everyone would be in a better place.

I'd really recommend that book for any of you who are bitter about this conglomerate. It not only explains the basis behind such lawsuits and labour disputes, but lists why Wal-Mart is so destructive for the environment (all the run-off from those paved parking lots has to end up somewhere) and small/local business. It's written by this old codger, Bill Quinn, who is rightly saddened in his old age. Time to listen to our elders. My Dad has always been anti-Wal-Mart and raised my brothers/sisters & I to support local business. I thought more people did this. I discover more and more every day that this is not the case.

http://www.tenspeedpress.com/catalog/tenspeed/item.php3?id=1046

[Jaimoe]

I refuse to go to Wal-Mart and all box-stores. If more people did the same, downtown cores like ( to name a few ) Belleville, Trenton, Cobourg, Brantford, and Cambridge would still remain vibrant and healthy.

[Kaidy Mae]

Brantford is a perfect example of a downtown core being slaughtered by the big boxes. I'd never seen it that bad until I went there to party with Band Whore. Everything was boarded up and empty. So sad!

[SmoothedShredder]

We should all move to Brantford and start a music-topia... where there would be one big box store, and it would sell Music Instruments... and then the town would rebuild around that... and in 2025, we will throw a great concert honouring Wayne Gretzy's Nobel prize in Economics.

Who's in?

~W

[Jaimoe]

Cambridge's town of Galt is slowly recovering from the " attraction " of Hespler Road's glut of box-stores. Belleville has a shitty city business planning and development commission and Trenton is trying to fight-back against ill-advised growth trends.

Edited May 5, 2005 by Guest

[Dancin man]

Brantford is a perfect example of a downtown core being slaughtered by the big boxes. I'd never seen it that bad until I went there to party with Band Whore. Everything was boarded up and empty. So sad!

Not now!!I just herd the other day that they are filming a movie in down town Brantford,and that they fixed it up to look like a run down town.The funny thing is,is that everyone thinks the down town looks better than it did before. So everyone wants them to keep it the way it is.That's great news for Brantford,bringing some money into the town and fixing it up also!!

[Kaidy Mae]

The funny thing is,is that everyone thinks the down town looks better than it did before. So everyone wants them to keep it the way it is.That's great news for Brantford,bringing some money into the town and fixing it up also!!

LMAO!!! Hahahahahahahahaaaaaa!!! Only in Brown Town could you do it up like a shithole and have it looking better. Thanks for that info Jeremy, that's hilarious! This I gotta see.

[Jaimoe]

I've been told by my mother and my girlfriend's parents that Brantford used to be one of the nicest cities in Ontario. A place that attracted people from all over. Urban decay is really sad.

[TomFoolery]

Funny thing.

I could never stand Toronto until about three years ago. I've always preferred the wilderness to urban centres, so Toronto was never appealing. Coming from the Ottawa Valley and going to school in Waterloo, the commute across Toronto for holidays really solidified my stand-point.

One day, I was visiting a buddy on west Dundas and we took a cab downtown. We started cruising through all these really old, funky, uber-urban neighbourhoods. The one store that stands out in my mind is a mom'n'pop vacuum cleaner store. A small independent vacuum cleaner store?!?

That got me thinking a bit more about the nature of the box store and where they thrive. Its all in mid-size cities with easy single family car transportation systems. In a metropolis like Toronto, box stores can't get the space they need to do their thing and the neighbourhoods are VERY cellular.

All in all, a city of that size gets wicked-cool neighbourhoods with all sorts of independent stores that have a very specific focus and there's enough people around that you can focus on really strange things, so there's great diversity too.

Anyhow, I now love VISITING Toronto (you'd have to nail my feet to a tree to get me to stay there). But I find it disappointing that all the mid-sized cities grow in a pattern that seems to remove any character that they developed over the last century.

Apologies for the digression, but ya got me musing...

[Kaidy Mae]

I've been told by my mother and my girlfriend's parents that Brantford used to be one of the nicest cities in Ontario. A place that attracted people from all over. Urban decay is really sad.

I've heard that too. A friend of mine (now in his mid 30s) grew up there and left at the beginning of high school. He was blown away to return there a few years ago. Really sad!

[can-o-phish]

I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw a commercial the other night for Wal-Mart Groceries. I don't darken their doors so I don't know how long they've been into produce but when will it stop??? When everyone's homes and menus are identical???

[timouse]

and to add to the list of Wal-Trocities...

Wal-Mart has repeatedly hired illegal migrants as cleaning staff & paid them peanuts. once caught, they deny knowledge and hang the "contractor who looks after cleaning stores" out to dry.

bastards.

[Snail]

as TomFoolery says one of the nicest thing about TO is the mom and pop stores all over the place. That is one of the reason I've been here for 15 years.....really nice to be able to walk across the street and buy 1 potatoe from your friendly corner store. That said TO has changed in these last few years with more and more moving to the surrounding areas and the Mom and Pop stores are slowly being gobbled up by the conglomerates. Whenever a funky old neighbourhood starts to get too much attention the big guys move in...just look at Queen St. between University and Spadina, used to be small book/clothing/art stores with the occasional coffee shop. Now it's the Gap, Le Chateau, Starbucks and Second Cups.

Wal-Mart has got to be the worst of the bunch, they really have an ability to kill an entire downtown core. They have just opened one up in Parry Sound (where I spend quite a bit of time) and I'm really nervous to see what's going to happen to the downtown core there.

I have shopped at the Wal-Mart here and the crap they sell seems so appealing until you leave the store, I think they must be using smell-O-rama to cloud your mind.

[Gr8FuL]

Fuck Walmart....I've never even been into one ever....No Need I can get everything and anything else..anywhere else!

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

First time I ever heard of Wal-Mart was via Jello Biafra railing against them as being among those stores that were getting blackballed by the pro-censorship types in Congress in the States - "if this album has a warning sticker we won't sell it" kind of thing - and given that there are so many communities where Wal-Mart might well be the only outlet for retail music.... They're all about the stripping down and poisoning of culture, among everything else. Fuck 'em. Grr.

If I ever start feeling too optimistic about the human race, the shortest way to nip that in the bud is to go into our local Wal-Mart in the three or four weeks before Xmas.

[Lazlo]

If I ever start feeling too optimistic about the human race, the shortest way to nip that in the bud is to go into our local Wal-Mart in the three or four weeks before Xmas.

That's the best time to shoplift.

[SmoothedShredder]

The Wal-Marts of Today will make great concert Venues in the future...

[timouse]

The Wal-Marts of Today will make great concert Venues in the future...

i think the former Lulu's in KW was a giant retail store in a past life...i wouldn't go as far as to say great, but i hope for a future where there are no wal marts and many live music venues

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Ah yes, Lulu's... . I think the shopper's paradise motif carried over pretty solidly there, i.e. from retail merchandise to full-on meat market. All very efficient, and awfully convenient for the shoppers in each instance.

Are there really that many places where you can buy and send up a colour-coded balloon to indicate the specific level of your horniness? Kinda clever, in an abstract way, but still.... Brings out the irate early Marx in me. (I still like the idea of incorporating black balloons into the scheme, but sometimes there's such a thing as too much honesty in advertising.)

But yeah, I'd rather music than muzak, that's for sure. And seeing Ronnie Hawkins playing with the Band there ratcheted up my respect for him infinitely - that guy had that crowd in the palm of his hand.

[SaggyBalls]

i can't wait for big boxes to destroy our communities and economies. grim as i might sound, it's the only way stunned suburbanites are going to realize the problem with a lack of foresight.

the quick fix meets the almighty dollar...

it's ruining our landscape. look at the ugly houses that get built up just to quickly inflate the economy and to fill a need for easily financable property.

it'll be awesome to see the mediocrity of our time topple our society to the ground.