Wal-Mart’s Local Harvest

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. unveiled a national TV advertising campaign on Sunday aimed at burnishing the image of the world’s largest retailer.

The 30-second and 60-second spots, which initially broadcast in Omaha, Neb. and Tucson Ariz., in the summer, feature Wal-Mart employees describing cost savings for shoppers, charitable donations and the company’s recent efforts to provide health insurance for eligible employees, according to a press release from the retailer.

Market Watch, January 7, 2007

At Wal-Mart, we know that being an efficient, profitable business and being a good steward of the environment are goals that can be accomplished together. And our environmental goals are simple and straightforward: to be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy; to create zero waste; and to sell products that sustain our resources and our environment. We believe that corporations can develop and implement practices that are good for the environment and good for business. We’re making amazing strides in this endeavor and we’re doing more every day.

from the Sustainability page, on Wal-Mart Facts

A study by the consulting firm Global Insight, which concludes that Wal-Mart’s expansion has saved U.S. consumers $263 billion, is deeply flawed. The statistical analysis generating this widely quoted figure fails the most rudimentary sensitivity checks used in good economic analysis, rendering its conclusions unreliable.

A robust set of research findings shows that Wal-Mart’s entry into local labor markets reduces the pay of workers in competing stores. This effect is largest in the South, where Wal-Mart expansion has been greatest.

Wal-Mart could raise wages and benefits significantly without raising prices, yet still earn a healthy profit. For example, while still maintaining a profit margin almost 50% greater than Costco, a key competitor, Wal-Mart could have raised the wages and benefits of each of its non-supervisory employees in 2005 by more than $2,000 without raising prices a penny

from the Economic Policy Institutes’ Report, “The Wal-Mart debate:A false choice between prices and wages.”

I live in one of those small central Illinois towns where it can be difficult to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart. Actually, there are two Wal-Marts nearby, one here in Charleston, and another about fifteen minutes away in Mattoon. We do have another grocery store, a local chain that was recently swallowed up by County Market, but they can’t beat the prices created by the economies of scale. Wal-Mart has, according to it’s website, “more than 6,600 stores in 13 countries and serve more than 176 million customers around the globe each week.”

If you are relatively affluent (or bored or both) and willing to spend the money, you can always drive an hour north to shop in Champaign, which as a university town has the usual quota of so-called health food groceries and the like. And, even though it makes no sense at all to burn up all that global-warming carbon just to avoid Wal-Mart, that is a fairly common thing among the local liberal cognoscenti, such as it is. (We have our own, much smaller university.) My guess is that Wal-Mart caught on among a lot of academic liberals because it meshes so well with their sense of superiority.

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S.A.D., TV, and Me

I’m not someone who deals well with change.  You’d know this by what’s in my dining room — a large glass tank containing a wooden hutch, a water bottle, and rodent bedding but no rodent. Our gerbil, Carmella, died a month ago and I can’t bring myself to take her cage down (or remove her from the freezer, where she rests in cold, stiff sleep next to Nibbles the guinea pig, now several years gone.

My S.A.D. kicked in two months ago, and on most days now you can find me walking around in a melancholic, nostalgic fog.  Here’s how bad it can get: I miss the old Cymbalta people.  You know, the various depressed-then-happy people on the commercial for the antidepressant Cymbalta: the African-American woman absently chopping vegetables as she gazes out the kitchen window; the older man whose wife has had enough of his silence at the dinner table and takes her plate elsewhere; the kind-of-cute guy whose neglected dog just wants to be walked; the near-comatose woman sprawled in her covers, unable to get her body out of bed (what;s abnormal about that?). All of them being depressed, then getting better, to a wistful piano song….

I miss them because Cymbalta has recently put on a new commercial, with a new group of people being depressed in various ways. The new dog is just as adorable, and it’s the same plaintive piano song, but something’s not right.  I don’t know these low-energy people neglecting their lives and hating themselves and making their families miserable.  I want the old ones back….

I am buoying myself with the fact that I’ve made it through other traumatic television changes — the exit of Ken Jennings from Jeopardy, for example. And I think I’ve finally made the transition from David Blaine to Criss Angel as my favorite cool magician.  Still, it’s nice to know I’m not alone, that there are others still recovering from the Dick-York- to- Dick-Sargeant switch (or is it the other way around?).

Local Saint

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“It’s official! Mother Theodore Guerin was declared a saint in St. Peter’s Square in Rome Sunday, Oct. 15. Sisters and pilgrims celebrated in Rome during the canonization ceremony. Seven hours later at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, Ind., sisters and visitors to the Church of the Immaculate Conception celebrated during the Eucharistic Liturgy. Visit our blog to get up-to-the-minute thoughts and reporting and stay tuned as we share photos, stories and more from both locales.”

from the Sisters of Providence Website

There’s more information on St. Mary of the Woods on Wikipedia, here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Mary-of-the-Woods_College

It’s a long, complicated process becoming a saint. Here’s a short explanation:

http://catholicism.about.com/cs/saints/a/becomesaint04.htm