I'm just curious...

You watched those blu-ray movies on your son's Playstation 3, on what kind of monitor?

Actually the sad fact is, yes it is that much cheaper at a Wal-Mart and if you are saving money, it is worth driving 20 miles. In fact, Wal-Mart is cheaper than pretty much any store in existence.

Moreover Wal-Marts are actually "scenes" where people go to just hang out. I am not kidding.

Wal-Mart is destructive however. Dozens and Dozens of American manufacturers kept getting squeezed by Wal-Mart to keep their goods on Wal-Mart shelves. Some of them literally felt pushed to move their operations overseas or lose access to the world's biggest retailer, who is the only game in many many towns.

I've furnished my condo almost entirely from IKEA for three reasons:

• I live in a 5th floor walk-up and it's almost impossible to get assembled furniture up the winding staircase. I view the requirement to construct the pieces as an advantage, not only because I can have bigger pieces than I might otherwise, but also because I know how they are put together, should anything break.
• By installing my own kitchen I was able to donate $10K in savings to non-profits. (The question of how much one should be spending on fine things for personal use during these hard times deserves to be explored.)
• I believed the sustainability pledge on IKEA's home page. Is it a lie?

We find ourselves in a time when things that used to be considered status-conscious, like buying the best made, sturdiest, generally the higher quality goods, is no longer snobbery but actually more constructive. I kinda like that.

We fell to the nadir of consumerism and the real collapse of the American economy when Wal-Mart became the No. 1 American corporation in terms of total revenue.

I would suggest that globalism has hurt the United States more than any other country--in fact, I would suggest that the concept of a 'global' economy was designed to attack the United States and its people.

We have been indoctrinated to embrace globalism, to embrace environmentalism, to embrace conservation, and recently to embrace the enormous flim-flam known as global warming. And America has been in decline during all of this. Like China, the few wealthy in this country have benefited enormously, but the middle class is in precipitous decline, our wealth has been taken, and the notion of meaningful work has been overtaken by admonitions that we are lucky to have a job at all, and if we think we will find any meaning or fulfillment in our corporate jobs, we are fools.

I do believe it is the case that the very concept of work has been brought into serious question. The population of the earth continues to grow to ever more enormous numbers--6 billion & counting, but meaningful, middle class employment is on the decline.

The tens of thousands of former systems engineers, programmers and baby-boomer techies who were tossed into the street over the last 10 years by age-discriminating, cheap-seeking, green-card seeking American corporations, who ended up working at Home Depot & as gofers at Wal-Mart are living (and dying) testament to the end of America as the golden beacon in the world. America is now the dumping ground of the world's cheap products and its even cheaper people. Illegal aliens have more rights & benefits than do real Americans who were born here and whose families lived & died here for generations. How can illegal aliens be given in-state tuition at any state university they happen to show up at? How is that justifiable or even legally possible? And that is only ONE instance of the destructive nature that this country has taken on in the interest of political correctness & downright stupidity.

There is no such thing as a business career any longer. The only thing that looks like a well-paying, career-oriented industry are some elements of the media. The TV talking heads being paid millions a year are doing well, while those of us who watch as they tell us how crummy things are fall into ignominy & despair.

This country has cost me, over the last 10 year, a fortune in money. I did the right thing, worked hard & long, managed my money, and in the end much of it was taken by my employer's corruption & bankruptcy (while its executives walked awsy with tens of millions of dollars), my government's indifference and arrogance, and criminality masked as incompetence.

Corporate social responsibility is all the rage. And there are businesses making good money auditing supplier factories. They are not trained like accountants, however, and it's very easy for factory managers to scam them. Plus, much of the work is sub-contracted perhaps several times, making it logistically impossible to visit more than a fraction of them.

Foreigners cannot walk around the Pearl River Delta, China's sweatshop, without being watched. The presumption is you are there to do some expose on terrible working conditions. Not surprisingly, local authorities are going to do their best to prevent that.

”You see, it all ties together. It is the Humanist Secular Liberal Agenda, which is removing God from our lives. You laugh, because you are a fool.”

Nope, not laughing. Rolling eyes is more accurate. I'm sure the greed of corporations had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Pigeonhole much?

And I am sure the greed of corporations has nothing to do with their lack of humanity; both operationally, and within the ranks of the executive and investor class.

Compartmentalize much?

"Wegmans ... sounds almost too good to be true." Indeed.

The author compares Ikea's sourcing of trees with Wegman's treatment of employees. Let's stay with the factors of production: trees for Ikea and hens for Wegman's eggs.

Wegman's owned an egg farm that practices the cruelest form of egg farming in use today. The farm is responsible for the institutionalized cruelty of 750,000 hens in battery cages so small that they can't flap their wings, where male chicks are killed within a day of birth, and where hens face debeaking, forced molting, forced chicken cannibalism and other atrocities. When the farm began to get bad press for their cruelty after some activists filmed the horrific conditions, the grocery arm of the firm sold it and chose instead to purchase eggs from the new owner of that same facility.

Ikea's sourcing of trees may well be illegal and unethical, and the firm is, no doubt, an unprincipled actor in other ways. But why single out Ikea for harming nonsentient beings (trees) and ignore Wegman's horrific treatment of sentient beings (chickens)? Wegman's sources its eggs from its former facility, which it set up as a cruel factory farm where profit trumps any consideration over the suffering of sentient creatures. Moral considerations do not apply only to people (or trees), and Wegman's is anything but a role model for ethical business practices.