Another Walmart Goodie?

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that a Walmart in Canton Ohio is having a drive to raise food for the needy. How socially aware of them. And so unusual for Walmart, which normally displays a regard for society at the level of Attila the Hun.

Except.

In this case the food drive is designed to help Walmart employees and not the public.

I wonder whether we file this piece of corporate wisdom in the same category as the recent MacDonalds advice personal finance to its employees who were assumed, in the illustrative budget they were given, to have no heating costs and so on. Only then could they save anything given the wages MacDonalds pays.

Back to Walmart.

Now it could be that a few employees had set the drive up on their own, without management consent, and that it is thus a local well intentioned effort to help co-workers. I am suspicious though. Mainly because Walmart’s management operates along the lines of a cross between the Gestapo, the Stasi, and the NSA. Remember, this is a company that has locked its employees in so that they don’t take unauthorized breaks. So the idea of anything resembling a food drive taking place without management consent is tenuous to say the least.

Maybe Walmart could pay its employees enough that they didn’t have to rely on charity for subsistence. Then again that might disrupt this year’s divined payout to the Walton family. Or it might lower senior management bonuses. And we don’t want to do that. Personally I am surprised we haven’t seen this food drive held up as another example of the “have-nots” trying to mooch of the “haves”. I just don’t get why the little people – the kind who resort to working for below living wages at places like Walmart – can’t make do with less. It’s not as if they have important things to do, or that they work for what they earn, like, say, the Walton family does.

Horrid, don’t you think?

Addendum:

You will notice in the story that there is a fund within Walmart that gives grants to employees in need – things like being homeless count as a “need” in this case. What you might miss as you read the article is that this fund is financed by employee payroll deductions. It isn’t a company effort at all. Although the company spokesman is clearly trying to position it such that the fund is viewed as an example of Walmart’s employee outreach. The gall of the company is astonishing. More astonishing is that, apparently, homelessness is common enough amongst its employees that it gets a mention as an example of the type of problem the fund is set up to offset.

Living wages? No. That can’t be part of the problem. Can it?