Portrait Of Poverty In America
Walmart's end-of-the-month midnight baby formula bread line
"A comment by Bill Simon, CEO of Walmart's U.S. operations, made last week at the Goldman Sachs Retail Conference:
'And you need not go further than one of our stores on midnight at the end of the month. And it's real interesting to watch, about 11 p.m., customers start to come in and shop, fill their grocery basket with basic items, baby formula, milk, bread, eggs, and continue to shop and mill about the store until midnight, when ... government electronic benefits cards get activated and then the checkout starts and occurs. And our sales for those first few hours on the first of the month are substantially and significantly higher.
And if you really think about it, the only reason somebody gets out in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they've been waiting for it. Otherwise, we are open 24 hours -- come at 5 a.m., come at 7 a.m., come at 10 a.m. But if you are there at midnight, you are there for a reason.'
"This is not the first time Walmart executives have pointed out the midnight electronic food stamp bread line. Last December, Walmart CFO Tom Schoewe was quoted making similar comments in "Midnight in the Food Stamp Economy," a definitive Reuters article on the subject by Nicole Maestri and Lisa Baertlein. Two years ago, Bill Simon's predecessor Eduardo Castro-Wright remarked upon the "disturbing" surge in sales of baby formula visible on the 1st and 15th of every month."
It's the small signs like these that really tell the tale. We're not being allowed to know the true extent of the economic collapse; government and it's media propaganda are continuing the recovery farce. One has to wonder what the kids were eating in between times.
In my area there are three clues to how bad it's getting. For sale signs are popping up like mushrooms and the foreclosure list is staggering, as a matter of fact the nearest neighbors disappeared in the middle of the night when their house was foreclosed.
I went to my auto insurance office and during the course of a conversation, sprinkled in as an afterthought, the secretary said a lot of people are just allowing their policies to expire - not canceling for some reason, just letting them run out.
I happened to bring a couple of those old Sacagawea dollars to the local grocery store and the checkout woman exclaimed how they were just being flooded by them, which I take to mean people are running out of money and are using the coins they had collected and set aside in a jar somewhere.
"A comment by Bill Simon, CEO of Walmart's U.S. operations, made last week at the Goldman Sachs Retail Conference:
'And you need not go further than one of our stores on midnight at the end of the month. And it's real interesting to watch, about 11 p.m., customers start to come in and shop, fill their grocery basket with basic items, baby formula, milk, bread, eggs, and continue to shop and mill about the store until midnight, when ... government electronic benefits cards get activated and then the checkout starts and occurs. And our sales for those first few hours on the first of the month are substantially and significantly higher.
And if you really think about it, the only reason somebody gets out in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they've been waiting for it. Otherwise, we are open 24 hours -- come at 5 a.m., come at 7 a.m., come at 10 a.m. But if you are there at midnight, you are there for a reason.'
"This is not the first time Walmart executives have pointed out the midnight electronic food stamp bread line. Last December, Walmart CFO Tom Schoewe was quoted making similar comments in "Midnight in the Food Stamp Economy," a definitive Reuters article on the subject by Nicole Maestri and Lisa Baertlein. Two years ago, Bill Simon's predecessor Eduardo Castro-Wright remarked upon the "disturbing" surge in sales of baby formula visible on the 1st and 15th of every month."
It's the small signs like these that really tell the tale. We're not being allowed to know the true extent of the economic collapse; government and it's media propaganda are continuing the recovery farce. One has to wonder what the kids were eating in between times.
In my area there are three clues to how bad it's getting. For sale signs are popping up like mushrooms and the foreclosure list is staggering, as a matter of fact the nearest neighbors disappeared in the middle of the night when their house was foreclosed.
I went to my auto insurance office and during the course of a conversation, sprinkled in as an afterthought, the secretary said a lot of people are just allowing their policies to expire - not canceling for some reason, just letting them run out.
I happened to bring a couple of those old Sacagawea dollars to the local grocery store and the checkout woman exclaimed how they were just being flooded by them, which I take to mean people are running out of money and are using the coins they had collected and set aside in a jar somewhere.
posted by nolocontendere at 6:54 PM
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