I love WalMart

...there...I said it. I love WalMart. I shop at WalMart and am going to start sticking up for WalMart from now on, starting with this post. I'm sure they have done numerous things unethically, and the latest settlement for failure to pay wages may cost them up to $640 million. Read the article

I didn't watch any of the documentaries detailing their wrongdoings because I don't need or want to see the details. I don't really care exactly what they've done wrong. I mean, come on people! They are one of the largest employers in America! Of course they have done things wrong and have ripped a few people off.

Here is why I love them, or at least why I see their value. Waaaay back in 2000, I moved from my family's home in a lovely little affluent suburb in Pittsburgh, Pa to a lovely little 2 bedroom apartment in Erie, Pa. I lived there with my sister. Those were fun and crazy times!

Moving to Erie was a culture shocking experience for me. All of my life I was told I wasn't living up to my potential, I don't apply myself, blah blah blah. All I really wanted to do was live in a shack in the woods and grow and kill my own food! I didn't realize my potential until I moved somewhere where people don't have potential, or at least they have never seen the potential they can achieve.

This, by the way, is one of the most annoying things about Erie. When I meet people from Erie and they don't know I lived there, they always put themselves and their community down. The negativity and insecurity of the place is its downfall. I will post-empt that statement by saying, I know that is a huge generalization and not everybody is negative and self-loathing.

I love Erie. It has beautiful scenery and lots of interesting people. It is a very diverse hard working place. I have never seen as many ethnic groups living together in my life; immigrants from all over: Puerto Rico, Russia, Africa; as well as black, white, Indian, Chinese, and Korean communities.

Living in Erie taught me a lot about the real world. After growing up in an all white community (okay, there were two black people in my class...) where the sparse racist remarks were always met with shock and dismay, I was shocked that the most diverse place I've ever been to was also the most openly racist.

I grew used to hearing the "N" word and other racial slurs. There was no group not guilty of the back and forth name calling. I grew used to meeting people that worked at least 2 jobs their whole life: career waitresses, shift workers at mills that only saw their families on weekends, cashiers and pizza delivery people. There is always the not so legal but higher paying jobs as well: drug dealing and thievery.

If I still lived in cozy little suburbia I would have definitely joined the picket line in the fight against WalMart. In fact, I did similar acts when I lived in Pittsburgh. My group of friends organized protests for pesticide use, recycling, and pollution discharge into small tributaries. Some of these protests actually changed things in our community.

But the bubble had been burst. I now had a slightly less optimistic view of the world. Why would I stand in a picket line when a lot of people around me didn't even have enough family support to graduate high school, practice safe sex and generally not feel so useless and victimized.

I could now see why some people need WalMart. These people are struggling to fulfill basic needs in their lives. Coming from a place where my biggest problem growing up was my mom harking on me to brush out my dreadlocks, I felt shallow and sheltered.

This fact was even more relevant when I moved out of Erie to a little town in the middle of nowhere, Spartansburg, Pa. The only WalMart within 30 miles had opened in the town next to it, in Corry, Pa, 2 years previously. Before that there were only two small grocery stores that served the surrounding area's population of close to 10,000.

If you wanted buy any clothes, you could either drive 45 minutes to Erie or Jamestown, NY or you could always buy Carharts at the feed store.

On the day of the grand opening of WalMart, people waited in line for 2 hours. When I moved to Spartansburg 2 years after that day, the friends that I made still talked about the opening day like it was the first time they saw the White House or the Empire State Building.

In the state of Pennsylvania, WalMart is the 3rd largest employer behind the State and Federal government positions. In Corry, when most employers would start you out at minimum wage, $5.15 at the time, with a raise of a quarter every year, WalMart was starting out at $6.50-$7/hour. And they gave you reviews and raises every 6 months. On top of that, some people who had been on Medicaid their whole lives were now able to afford private health care insurance for themselves and their family.

I don't even know how people survived on the stagnant $5.15 minimum wage, but I digress.

I'm not saying all of this to show you what bumpkins I live near and how backwards they are. I'm saying this merely to demonstrate the need for WalMart in some areas. I don't necessarily think people need gadgets and gear and 500 thread count sheets. But when you live in a place that is not 'modern' and the rest of the world around you is, I think it is important to at least be exposed to what is normal to the 80% of the country that lives in urban areas.

After all, if you want people to be educated and succeed and make a difference in the world, they need to be able to relate and communicate with a variety of people. How are you supposed to relate to people when you can't talk about your favorite episode of "The Office" with the 'city folk' you meet in college?

The Corry WalMart was the first place in the area to carry organic produce and food product options. Being in the middle of nowhere there are some major farms in the area, and WalMart carries local produce and meat products from some of these farms. They even carry organic cotton clothes!

So, I guess I have a skewed opinion of WalMart, but I want to put it out there for all of the people who want a balanced opinion of what really happens when a WalMart moves into a small town.

Green is on my mind

...and it's not necessarily about conserving resources. All of this talk about the recession and everyone losing jobs and not being good little consumers is starting to ruin my holiday season optimism.

The recession, as it is now officially labeled, has not really touched my life directly. Thankfully, since I took 10 years deciding what I wanted to work on for the rest of my life, I chose a career that every business needs—a web site.

Through thick or thin, a business needs a web site. They may even need to focus more on their web site during a recession. Having some of the lowest overhead out there, after a little investment, your site sits out for the world to see and can even make money while you sleep.

This 'recession' reminds me of one of those times when you say to yourself "I thought of that first!" It makes me a little mad at first, but in order to keep myself ever-optimistic about everything, I have to immediately turn the negative into the positive. So, now I'm just laughing to myself.

I hear you saying "Hey crazy, what are you talking about?" Let me get to the point. When you are a 'business person' and one with lots of money, you can't think "I'm an oil woman and I'll stay an oil woman." You should think "I'm rich and I'm going to stay rich."

This is how people keep their money! I'm not an expert on world or national affairs, but from what I gather, the 'going green' trend started gaining momentum about 4 or 5 years ago. If I had billions of dollars invested in the oil industry then, I would have started spreading out into some kind of promising alternative energy industry.

Sure, there are risks. But buying stocks are also a risk, as we have all found out. What if all of that money went into investing in start-ups that were researching or producing alternative energy?

Think about this little tid-bit of information from www.investorhome.com:

A general rule for the breakdown of returns among VC company investments is 40% will be complete losses, 30% will be "living dead," with the remaining 30% generating substantial returns on the original investment. The big winners yield 10 or more times the original investment.

If you invested in a variety of start-ups or were involved in an investment club, you would maybe realize returns of 30% plus. If you were really lucky and an investing genius, you may realize returns of 300%. Sure, the higher the return the bigger the risk. In hindsight, you may have wished you took this risk.

Maybe because I do tend to question everything in the media and I don't practice good consumerism I saw this recession, crash, bubble burst coming! Basically, the marketing tactics used earlier this decade created a monster that just ate and ate and ate. Eventually the perfect little picture that was painted in our heads had to be revealed as a fake.

Okay, so now that we have a recession (a need for jobs and credit) and we have an emerging industry (the need for producing alternative fuels) why don't we steer some of our money towards creating jobs in the alternative energy field?

That sounds pretty simple, it's probably not that simple...but I never said I was an expert! But after listening to some of these CEO's talk about why they need to be bailed out, you would think that they have no true grasp of what real people want.

Their trick was to tell Americans what they want. But we stopped listening! When it was their turn to listen they just paid their advertising team to create a new marketing campaign to try to trick us into listening again!

Well, now they are listening or should start ASAP. And I think some politicians are also listening. The fact that our new president has developing alternative fuels towards the top of list, instead of pretending the need doesn't even exist, is exhilarating to me.

Thank Jupiter for some rational thinking!

To wrap this up, I told you so. Mr. Obama, if you want to have lunch some time and I can tell you all of my other ideas, feel free to email me. I could be the breath of fresh air that you are looking for!