Saturday, January 9, 2010

Wally World: Screw The Poor!

I guess this means that Wally World can drop the "Live Better" part of their new slogan:
This week the New York Times reported a disheartening story about two of the largest retail chains. You see, instead of taking unsold items to sample sales or donating them to people in need, H&M and Wal-Mart have been throwing them out in giant trash bags. And in the case that someone may stumble on these bags and try to keep or re-sell the items, these companies have gone ahead and slashed up garments, cut off the sleeves of coats, and sliced holes in shoes so they are unwearable.

This unsettling discovery was made by graduate student Cynthia Magnus outside the back entrance of H&M on 35th street in New York City. Just a few doors down, she also found hundreds of Wal-Mart tagged items with holes made in them that were dumped by a contractor. On December 7, she spotted 20 bags of clothing outside of H&M including, "gloves with the fingers cut off, warm socks, cute patent leather Mary Jane school shoes, maybe for fourth graders, with the instep cut up with a scissor, men’s jackets, slashed across the body and the arms. The puffy fiber fill was coming out in big white cotton balls.”
The bright side is that they were finally embarrassed into doing the right thing. I just wonder if their so-called shock at this behavior was because they couldn't believe their stores were doing this or simply because they got caught.

3 comments:

  1. I think I can shed some light on this. And mind you, I am defending, nor critizing- just giving the facts as I know them.
    We throw a lot of things away at our Wal Mart store. A couple months ago, I saw someone throw away about 6 car seats for infants in the crusher. I asked why and they said they were display models and even though they looked ok, they may have germs or missing parts on them and so they can't give them away because of the risk of a lawsuit to give them away. Same thing with clothes and shoes. It's all because of lawsuits and you see that in many businesses, just not the big stores. When i worked for the Salvation army in Wausau, we had the same problem- not too many people were willing to donate damaged items for fear of lawsuits.
    We throw away a lot of food for various reasons- frozen food left out too long, mislabeling, deformed bottle and whatever. We are supposed to destroy this, again because of the threat of lawsuits.
    Now, our store does donate some items that are damaged to food banks and other organizations and I am sure other stores do as well.
    Also, each store has a donation fund where the store will donate money or non-damaged items to various agencies. That is fact and most stores donate many thousands of dollars.
    These are facts that the liberals of the world don't want to accept because of Wal Mart's image, but many thousands of people around the U.S. know the real truth.

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  2. With all the awesome steam cleaners out there...there is no reason to throw away a car seats (or anything else that can be cleaned with steam) because of germs. Missing parts...yes...but germs no.

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  3. Thank a lawyer. They're also running America, into the ground.

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