Well, let’s hear it for one of the Big Box types. No, not Target nor Wal*Mart, rather let’s hear it for the CEO of Costco.
From what I’ve read, he pays his employees a living wage, gives them benefits and makes enough of a profit to give himself a salary of close to $500K/year. That sounds like a Big Box Store and its CEO with a conscience and a soul. Unlike the Walton minions from Arkansas, whose CEO makes more in an hour than his employees make in a year.
By the way, in Fostoria, Ohio, in the city’s cemetery is the tombstone epitaph that has etched in granite the saddest farewell I’ve ever witnessed: “Gone to Wal*Mart.” Yes, some woman thought that is the destination with which she’d like to be tagged forever or at least as long as granite lasts. That is not unlike the supposed last will and testament that ordered the cremated remains of the deceased to be scattered in the Wal*Mart parking lot, so that a regular visit from family could be assured. It is hard to imagine that those who make so damned little flock to Wal*Mart as though it were heaven-sent. I guess those in an abusive realtionship never quite mangage to get out of it, without lots of help!
I am about ready to buy my Cheerios, toilet paper, frozen chicken parts and cheap coffee by the case, push one shopping cart and pull another through the Costco parking lot to fill my Ford F-150. The problem is that the Costco store is an hour’s drive away. So, I’ll have to waste fuel dollars by patronizing BP to get to a Big Box Store with integrity. If I’m not likely to do that and I can afford to make a choice, how can anyone expect the abused customers/employees at Wal*Mart to do otherwise than get to the closest Arkansan Outlet.
My god, what has this country come to? And we thought that the age of Robber Barons was old, if not ancient, history. Where are the Rockefellers and the Fords when we need them. At least, in the earlier auto and oil business a person could make a living, at union wages.
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, who the hell cares? Well, apparently those whom Romney had no interest in care. The lower forty-some percent of the population have little or no choice than to shuffle off to buy discounted products manufactured in sweat-shops in Bangladesh or ground fresh in the pink-slime meat processors right here in the good ole USA.
Anyone with a gram of moral sense, and of course, the extra money it takes to make the purchase, will ever again buy anything except at a local merchant.
Sanchismos 
In addition, we need to more often and more relentlessly use WalMart’s low prices to coerce Kroger’s and their ilk to abandon unnecessarily inflated prices. By the way, coerce is a perfectly good word; it means to persuade an unwilling (for whatever reason) person or group of persons to do something by using force, i.e., the force of their purchasing power.
And then, we need to redefine the so-called American Dream.
A part of Kroger’s prices have to do with Kroger being a union shop, paying decent wages with benefits. What needs doing is to coerce Wal*Mart to pay decent wages and offer real benefits, stop importing slave-labor products; then their price will necessarily get closer to Kroger.
The Kaufmann Market, Alma’s Sandwich/Soup Counter located inside her and Tom’s ‘filling station”, Wm. Payne’s Clock /Watch Shop, and the ‘new big’ drugstore in Trotwood, where I was the 15 year old soda jerk, really were childhood and adolescent gifts. But, we were too young and stupid to know it. Or, at least I was. And, Ike was the Prexy! Joe