Why is Wal-Mart in the news ... again?

I just learned that an anonymous source at some anonymous Wal-Mart some-anonymous-where has confirmed rumors that it will be the newest outlet for the iPhone.

Wal-Mart? Really!? Again, I say it -- oh shit, oh dear.

Apple could make no announcement more calculated to bring me feelings of ... well, ambivalence, at best, but more like feelings of mild disgust. An announcement that the iPhone can work on any network, that I'd greet with glad tidings of great joy.

The fact that Wal-Mart may soon carry iPhones doesn't change my opinion about Wal-Mart; nor will it make it more likely I'll willingly set foot inside one. Rather, it cheapens the allure of owning an iPhone of my very own.

I'll have to cop to being a fan of Apple computers. While it would stretch the truth to call me an original fan, I did once own an Apple IIe and, in the late 1980s, I learned the basics of Pagemaker (a version of it with none of those annoying suffixes) on a cool, boxy Apple Macintosh SE.

Indeed, for a while there in the late 1990s, our home computer was a genuine, first-generation Mac, albeit one hopped up with a screaming-fast 4 meg of RAM, a versatile 800k internal drive and two powerful external 40 meg hard drives. We still have most of the pieces it on a shelf in the garage, right next to the old black Underwood typewriter.

Today, I couldn't survive professionally without my MacBook, our home computer is a 17" lamp-shade iMac and I really like the music on my 80-gig iPod (and for some reason, this fact fills me with surprised delight). It is only by main force of will that I've managed to refrain from putting one of those discreet white Apple logos on the rear window of my conservative black Buick.

I'd already have an iPhone but, alas, the folks that provide exclusive cellular service for it isn't kind to the part of the world where I live. Their signal's spotty out here in the hinterlands of Milam County.

So, I deal with it. No iPhone for now. Maybe later. But I wonder if anyone else sees the irony in this ... that the average Wal-Mart shopper will soon have easy access to one of the coolest personal computers ever made (if you wonder what I might think of that, see the immediately previous post).

Wal-Mart shoppers

I am not a Wal-Mart shopper. In fact, except for our nine-month exile in Marble Falls, I've pretty much stayed away from Wally World and that's hard to do in our part of the country.

So, I wasn't close to a Wal-Mart last week when a contract employee at a Long Island store was trampled to death after he opened the doors to a tidal surge of Black Friday shoppers. And here I thought the South had a monopoly on that sort of Wal-Mart crowd.

It's not that I don't like shopping in big, soul-sucking steel boxes. After all, I braved the Black Friday crowds in search of a bargain on an elusive 37" flat screen LCD HiDef television. While I love to shop for electronics, I really don't like those kinds of intense, high stakes shopping excursions.

I tracked down that tv to Best Buy, a big, soul-sucking steel box. Saved 200 bucks on that sucker and I'll probably go back for the BlueRay thingy and the home theater system every large, flat-screen tv machine screams for (yes, I can hear it screaming -- in perfect counterpoint to the voices in my head -- and it wants digital sound ... ).

So, no, it's not Wal-Mart's big, soul-sucking steel box. It's that I'm politically, economically and morally opposed to Wal-Mart and have been for for a dozen years or so, long before Black Friday became a blood sport for intrepid Wal-Mart shoppers.

Given my background as a publisher of small, weekly newspapers, I could sing chorus after chorus on the evils of Wally World. It destroys local, mom-and-pop businesses, it drives down the cost of labor, most of its employees are on welfare, it imports most of its cheap, shoddy merchandise from China*, will not seriously advertise in local newspapers (a deadly sin, in my book).

Well, as I said, I could go on. And on. And on. But I won't.

But I do wonder this ... not about Wal-Mart but about what happened this Black Friday past and what it says about us. The poor fella in Long Island wasn't the only shopping-related fatality that day. There was at least one other and a dozen or so reported injuries.

Will the reporting on future Black Fridays include a death toll? Is this destined to become our uniquely American version of soccer game riots? This is only the second or third Black Friday I've been involved with (well, as a consumer, that is) and I found the experience less than satisfying. Except for the part about saving 200 bucks. That was satisfying.

Much like I avoid Wal-Mart, I think I will avoid Black Friday in the future. It seems to speak to a dank, dark part of the American psyche that is best left to the professionals like Stephen King to write about. Stephen King scares me so I'll not be seeing you in the soul-sucking steel box next Black Friday.

Unless I can save 200 bucks ... in which case, I'm there!


(*Wait a minute ... considering how much we've borrowed from the Chinese ... and how much Wal-Mart buys from them, does that mean Wal-Mart is the new General Motors [as in "What's Good for Wal-Mart is Good For America]? oh, shit, oh dear ... I"ll have to explore THAT pernicious concept in another post ... shudder.)