Tuesday, August 30, 2005

1426 Do you buy organic and avoid Wal-Mart?

Tomeboy has an interesting collection of contrasts for you Wal-Mart avoiders.

"800,000 organic farm workers are hired each year in California by 35,000 employers. Wal-Mart has 44,000 employees in California.

The average California organic farm worker annually earns $7000-$8000 or $6.75/hour (California minimum wage). His counterpart at Wal-Mart makes $9.70/hour.

Only 19% of organic farm workers have some type of health insurance compared to 90% of employees at Wal-Mart." Read the whole story here.

I was chatting the other day with a woman who works in a small franchise operation where I was shopping--very up-scale, very posh-posh, full of bling-bling. She was breathless with excitement that she might get in at the local Wal-Mart.

3 comments:

Susan said...

Thanks, Norma,
I'm not a big fan of Walmart because I prefer Meijers. However, my husband loves Walmart and he takes care of the budget...so we usually shop at Walmart. I'm really sick of the anti-Walmart stuff...Today I had a Walmart bag full of frozen dinners I was leaving in the staff freezer...I almost hesitated and then said..fooey, too bad!

Norma said...

I shop Meijers for groceries--no WM super stores around here. But when we're at Lakeside, I love to go to the WM near Port Clinton. H & B, art supplies, film, clothes, cat food, home furnishings. Can't beat it. And the employees are happier than most I've seen in libraries.

Anonymous said...

I do some shopping at Wal-mart, but do buy organic because I just don't go for pesticides and herbicides. It's sad that organic farm workers don't have benefits, but I think that says more about how difficult it is to make a living doing organic farming. I'm not anti-Wal-mart and do some of my shopping there, but I do miss the independently owned stores of my youth (before the malls were full of chain stores) and am not happy with corporate farming and what it does to the environment...in other words, I don't take either side completely. Glad to see that you're back to blogging after your hiatus...did I miss your reentry while I was away?

Karin