Walmart Folds Again

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist 

Walmart, the world's largest retailer with total annual sales in excess of $500 billion, is headquartered in the modest rural city of Bentonville, Arkansas (pop. 50,000).  The corporation has an outsized presence across rural America where its stores tend to quickly become the social hubs of most small communities.  Walmart stores are where Americans go to shop and to catch up with their neighbors.   Many of America's small town "values" are shaped and polished in the aisles of its Walmart stores.

Walmart's highly conservative founding family, and still its majority stockholders, the Waltons of Bentonville, cast their cold and callous shadow across much of the country as they struggle to snuff out competition and while keeping wages and benefits at the lowest levels possible, yet all the while posing as good ol' boys who earned their place at the head of America's economic table through hard work and fair dealing.

The Waltons no longer run Walmart on a day-to-day basis.   The corporation has a large board of directors who bring in professionals to guide the company, a group of people who try to manage things in a way befitting the largest retailer in the world.  There is a rub, however, when it comes to running an international endeavor whose roots are firmly dug into the stony soil of rural Arkansas.

Last July, for example, when Walmart management decided that it would be prudent, for several good reasons, to implement a mandatory mask policy in all of its stores, a tornado of public outrage ripped through its customer base before the policy could be implemented.  That open hostility, undoubtedly coupled with firm nudging from the Waltons, resulted in a quick change of procedure.  The stores would still have a policy requiring masks, but employees would not enforce the policy.   The company would presumably have some liability protection because it had told customers to wear masks, and the customers would have the outlaw high of knowing there were deliberately flouting a store policy and getting away with it.

Walmart had folded like a Walmart card table.

This week the management again stirred up a hornet's nest among its rural shoppers when it decreed that because of the possibility of domestic turmoil as a result of next week's election, all stores would remove guns and ammunition from public display.  (People could still buy guns and ammo, but those items would not be within grabbing distance.)  After some intense public grumbling that was no doubt stirred by the gun lobby and words of concern from some of the Waltons, the corporate management backed off of that edict as well and announced today that guns and ammo would remain in full public view during whatever happened after the election.

People might need more guns in a hurry, and Walmart best not get in their way!

Another day, another Walmart card table hits the floor.

It's hard to behave like a legitimate international corporation when your immediate world view is of the quick stops and fast food joints along Sam Walton Boulevard in Bentonville, Arkansas!