Ad says Black Friday protestors are paid, lazy millennials

By Dan Brooks in Rhetoric 1 Comment

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-BsjnlaPW8

The commercial above was produced by Worker Center Watch, a website registered to Parquet Public Affairs, a lobbying and PR firm led by Joseph Kefauver. Kefauver is the former president of public relations for Walmart and the former government relations director for Darden Restaurants, which owns Red Lobster and Olive Garden. Pretty much everything good and profitable in America has been publicly related by Kefauver, and yet his clients are the objects of massive protests. It doesn’t make sense. Walmart served 22 million customers on Thanksgiving Day, so Americans obviously support the idea of giving people who worked that night $8.25 an hour. The only explanation is that unions are paying lazy kids with great hair to protest.

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Ohio Walmart holds food drive for workers, enraging all

By Dan Brooks in consumerism 1 Comment
They also threw in a couple of capital letters they had lying around.

They also threw in a couple of capital letters they had lying around.

The internet was all atwitter yesterday with news that a Canton, OH Walmart was holding a Thanksgiving food drive for needy workers. The drive asked for donations from employees, not from customers as Business Insider and certain other outlets gleefully reported. Their exuberance was unbecoming but understandable. As America’s largest retailer and, now, grocer, Walmart is maybe responsible for a broad degradation of working life. The giant corporation pays its workers low wages in order to offer low prices, which drives smaller retailers and grocers out of business, which increases the share of the workforce earning low wages at Walmart. As a bonus, those people are also more likely to have to shop at Walmart. If you already have an opinion about this process, yesterday’s news was proof of concept.

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