NPR reports two Wal-Mart employees tested positive for COVID-19. Wal-Mart Employees. The same employees who are never given forty hour work weeks with enough regularity to qualify for full time benefits. Wal-Mart: The conglomerate that drove our friends and neighbors out of business while stifling the right to unionize. Wal-Mart who promised plastic partition shields for their cashiers in addition to practicing social distancing. The cashiers who fell ill were employed by an Illinois Wal-mart, but rest assured Orlando, Florida Wal-Marts will be this cities nastiest hotspots soon enough.
After donning a mask and gloves, my husband and I braved both an Orlando area Wal-Mart and a local supermarket. Over at the grocery store, everyone was doing the right thing. We went into Wal-Mart and it was like the wild west. Visual assessment saw perhaps one fourth cooperation by patrons with regard to face coverings. There were no cordoned off intervals for social distancing. No gloves were to be seen. Everyone appeared to still be observing old-normal distancing as the same eighteen to twenty four inches for business and Boston was as far as customers remained apart. It was appalling for reasons too numerous to mention.
We have decided as a family not only to stay out of the Petri dish that Wal-Mart is, but considering what lies ahead for those two uninsured, undervalued employees we cannot continue to make the sixth wealthiest woman in the world any richer.
I shudder to think of the medical bills these two workers-who still came to work so we could buy hair color and candles-will incur. Alice Walton needs to set up a GoFundMeCoronaSeries and be the first donor.
Clearly Alice isn't of Walton's Mountain lineage-if she had been we wouldn't even be having this conversation.