I know I'm a rare defector from the belief that consumers all shop at Wal-Mart out of a deep-seated ideological affection for the company's labor practices, but even I'm surprised to see them coming dead last in a survey of consumer satisfaction. They're below the insurance industry!
Relatedly, I was at an AEI event on Wal-Mart where Michael Barone sagely explained that voters didn't want Democrats to shut down Wal-Mart, and so all these Democrats attacking the company are pursuing the modern equivalent of the nuclear freeze campaign from the 80s. That's, uh, one interpretation. Of course, the question has never been an existential one. Search the landscape, there's no such thing as an "End Wal-Mart Now" campaign. There's a robust campaign to force them to pay higher wages and offer better health care, significantly safer ground for Democrats, but center-right pundit types tend to forget the word "wages" when they begin sniffing about all the class warfare.
A particularly hilarious example of why they ignore or distort the wage issue came when some AEI functionary stood up to forthrightly address the issues of Wal-Mart's $15,500 average full-time wage. That's probably a lot of money in Dayton Ohio, she said, and Wal-Mart hires single mothers who would -- I'm not making any of this up -- otherwise become prostitutes. In the next room, you could hear satire dying.
