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Talk
about preparing kids for the real world. Four public high schools in Detroit
have partnered with Walmart to train 60 students to work at its stores:
Advocates say with Detroit's unofficial unemployment rate nearing 50%, jobs at Walmart are a golden opportunity. Sean Vann, principal of the Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Men, has 30 students in the program. He told the Detroit Free Press he's enthusiastic because along with earning money, since the schools are in the suburbs, the students will be around people from different cultures.
Not everyone, however, is convinced that it's such a good idea:
Donna Stern, a representative of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights And Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) is outraged. "They're going to train students to be subservient workers. This is not why parents send them to school."
What do you think, Neatoramanauts? Better a crappy job than no job at all?
Link (Photo: GeneralCheese/Wikipedia)
Where do you go to buy things to decorate your walls? Wall*Mart, of course! Buzzfeed’s Mike Hayes took this picture in the Dominican Republic. Link
There
are two sure things about Walmart: there are great shopping deals and
strange people (I'm looking at you, People
of Walmart) every single day.
Heck, with some 3,750 stores across the United States visited by customers 140 million times a week, you're bound to see strange sights. Yet it seems like there's something special about Walmart shoppers ... Miguel Bustillo wrote his observation for The Wall Street Journal:
Almost any imaginable aspect of American life can and does take place inside Wal-Mart stores, from births to marriages to deaths. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin once officiated a wedding at the Wal-Mart in her hometown of Wasilla.
So, it seems, can any conceivable mishap. A Maryland man wound up in an emergency room with a toilet seat stuck to him after pranksters in March doused a Wal-Mart restroom with glue. Last year, an Ohio shoplifter who jumped in a garbage bin outside Wal-Mart later called 911; he was being compacted, and needed rescue.
A shopper at a Wal-Mart in Falmouth, Mass., uncovered a dental mystery two years ago when she found 10 human teeth inside a wallet for sale that was imported from Asia.
"I wanted to investigate it further but my supervisor said it wasn't worth the trip to Taiwan," says Falmouth police detective James Pires.
Animal sightings are a subspecies of Wal-Mart weirdness. The most notorious was "Norman the Nutria," a rodent that took residence inside a Wal-Mart in Abbeville, La., and spooked a female customer so badly that she says she ran over her foot with a shopping cart in 2008, breaking two bones. She sued in Louisiana state court, alleging workers had been chasing the animal for days and had given it a nickname.
"They should have been warning people," says Anthony Fontana, the attorney for alleged victim Rebecca White, who says she's racked up $58,000 in medical bills. "Those things get teeth as big as a beaver's."
People get a little crazy when an item they want goes on sale, or becomes available during a shortage. Some have been injured, or even killed over a simple act of shopping.
Mass shopping can be like mass religion… what starts as a joyful experience can many times spiral into cold-hearted brutality showing the unfortunate soiled underbelly of mankind. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we are, at our core, irrational animals. So the next time you consider getting that “hot new item” you just got to have, make sure you don’t become one of the headlines below.
Check out the following 16 Unbelievable Shopping Disasters and make it a point to be “nicer” to your fellow man this upcoming holiday season. The life you save may well be your own!
From the Upcoming 
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The King of Pop didn’t die. He just got tired of the celebrity life and decided to go shop at Wal-Mart. Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Beer or Kid
Doing some Black Friday shopping? Make sure you get your caffeine, have plenty of cash and checks on hand, and program your doctor’s office on your speed dial. As the day and the deals have gotten more hyped up over the past several years, stampedes and fights have broken out in the frenzy, resulting in injuries and even death. Here are a few of those incidents.
Just last year, a “greeter” at Walmart in Valley Stream, New York, was killed when the crowd of 2,000+ people trampled over him when the doors opened on Black Friday. Jdimytai Damour was 6’4” and 270 pounds and was trying to hold back shoppers who were pressed up against the sliding glass doors. The doors shattered from the pressure, Damour was thrown to the floor, and shoppers rushed over him in a craze to get to their bargains. The official ruling was that he died of asphyxiation. Although other shoppers were injured in the stampede, Damour was the only fatality – the other four injured people were treated and released from the hospital, including a woman who was eight months pregnant. There were reports that she had miscarried, but they were false. Damour’s family has filed a lawsuit against Walmart, citing that the company “engaged in specific marketing and advertising techniques to specifically attract a large crowd and create an environment of frenzy and mayhem and was otherwise careless, reckless and negligent.” Photo from FoxNews.com.
In 2005, it wasn’t a stampede to get to items that caused trouble at Walmart – it was a single line-cutter. People were waiting in an orderly line at an Orlando store to get a heavily discounted computer when one man jumped ahead in the line. The assembled crowd wasn’t really appreciative of this – they ended up wrestling him to the ground.
Last year was definitely a bad year for Black Friday shoppers. On the same day, but a different coast, two men were shot and killed after an argument at a Toys “R” Us in Palm Desert, California. The women they were with were arguing – even coming to blows, according to the Huffington Post – and the fight escalated when the men discovered that they belonged to rival gangs. They ended up shooting only each other – no other injuries were reported. Photo from LAist.com.
Another computer was the source of a riot at the same retailer in 2005. When a laptop went on sale for $100 off the normal price, Cecelia Brannon of Jacksonville, Fla., was second in line because she wanted to get one for her daughter in college. When the doors opened, she got pushed under the rushing crowd and ended up suffering from a concussion and continuing back and neck problems. “This is America’s version of the running of the bulls,” her husband said. As of 2007, Cecelia was still walking with a cane as a result of her Black Friday injuries and still had to take a slew of prescription medications. “I saved 100 on that computer,” she said. “I’ve spent probably $100,000 on medical bills.”
P.S. – I didn’t intend to hate on Walmart, but a vast majority of the Black Friday incidents happened there! If you’re headed to score some deals tomorrow, be extra careful. What’s your opinion – should the onus be on the retailer for not providing enough security, or should people be responsible for their own actions?
Sixty one year old Georgia man named Roger Stephens was apparently fed up with a crying toddler while shopping at Walmart. Not one to suffer in silence (just look at that scowl!) Roger took matters to his own hands – literally:
The child was crying, which apparently greatly perturbed Matthews. "If you don’t shut that baby up I will shut her up for you," Stephens warned Matthews, according to a Gwinnett County Police Department report. Moments later, Stephens acted on his threat, slapping Paige "across the face approximately four or five times." Though the child "started crying and screaming" after being struck, Stephens told Matthews, "See, I told you I would shut her up."
If you, for some weird reason or another, have any interest in signing up to WalMart’s Twitter feed, be prepared to agree to a 3,379 word long (lord only knows how many characters) Terms of Use.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of Twitter myself, but I do understand that the main attraction is the simplicity of limiting things to 140 characters or less. It kind of defeats the purpose when you have a TOS this long.
Link Via BoingBoing
Sci-fi author and journalist Charles Platt (he’s an editor of our pal Make magazine) decided that he’s going to find out once and for all whether Walmart is evil or good … so he applied for a job there!
Here’s why he thinks that despite its bad reputation, Walmart is actually a good company to work for:
A week later, I found myself in an elite group of 10 successful applicants convening for two (paid) days of training in the same claustrophobic, windowless room. As we introduced ourselves, I discovered that more than half had already worked at other Wal-Marts. Having relocated to this area, they were eager for more of the same.
Why? Gradually the answer became clear. Imagine that you are young and relatively unskilled, lacking academic qualifications. Which would you prefer: standing behind the register at a local gas station, or doing the same thing in the most aggressively successful retailer in the world, where ruthless expansion is a way of life, creating a constant demand for people to fill low-level managerial positions? A future at Wal-Mart may sound a less-than-stellar prospect, but it’s a whole lot
better than no future at all.In addition, despite its huge size, the corporation turned out to have an eerie resemblance to a Silicon Valley startup. There was the same gung-ho spirit, same lack of dogma, same lax dress code, same informality – and same interest in owning a piece of the company. All of my coworkers accepted the offer to buy Wal-Mart stock by setting aside $2 of every paycheck.
Read the rest of what Charles wrote for The New York Post: Link
This animation just confirms what I already knew: Wal-Mart is sweeping the nation like an unstoppable virus. It’s pretty amazing to see how the company has exploded across the States since 1965. Click on the link to see it go from one dot (one store), to a few dots, to several dots, to a handful to dots, to complete domination.
Link via DarkRoastedBlend
Here’s a funny article at ZUG, written by Joe the Peacock of Mentally Incontinent about his experiences working at America’s favorite store: Wal-Mart …
I first heard about the Wal-Mart position from a friend of mine who was working the early morning shift at the famous discount retailer. He explained that the electronics department needed a full-time employee on the overnight shift, because the last person who worked there was caught masturbating to a Cindy Crawford workout tape at 2 AM while the other employees were goofing off in the break room.
Sadly, I’m not kidding.
Joe went on to describe how he was pranked at Wal-Mart, got fired by an unscrupulous gang who framed him for theft, and how he got a sweet, sweet revenge: Link – via Miss Cellania (who has a whole list of Wal-Mart related websites)
