bouncing happy faces?

Supposedly, Wal-Mart is improving its employees' health care benefits, attempting to be a "good steward" for the environment, even calling for a higher minimum wage. So what's up? Has the paradigmatic hypercorporate megachain found Jesus? Have we won one?

I have to admit to mixed feelings upon reading these reports. I hate Wal-Mart politically, philosophically, spiritually, culturally, and spatially. They could make all of these changes and more and it wouldn't change the fact that those Gawd-awful stores are a butt-ugly fluorescent blight across 98.4% of North America, and it's going to take me twice as long to creep my car down Georgia Street as soon as the latest one opens.

I avoid shopping there. Like the freaking plague.

But I also have relatives who work for the company. One has worked a number of jobs that I wouldn't touch, but he is also an essentially decent person in extremis and seems quite happy. The other Wal-employed relative is learning disabled and has had significant trouble finding work. The local Wal-Mart actually pays and (so far) treats her better than any other job has.

So far. Ah, there's the rub. Right now, in the microcosm of my family life and the macrocosm of national and global corporate politics, Wal-Mart seems to be doing some things right, maybe.

Like Hamlet, I know not seems. But I am old enough to remember that it used to be quite hip, in the 1980s, to Buy American. You see where I'm going with this: all those red-white-and-blue stickers on all those products under all those fluorescent lights in all those Wal-Marts. And every single one a cynical lie.

So is Wal-Mart really going to start treating its employees, my relatives, and the world better?

We'll see.

SPACEDARK