Wal-Mart Goes Organic - No, Really!

It's not that I have nothing better to do than sit around watching for dirt on Wal-Mart. Really. It's just that they make it so. darn. easy. I'd suggest they change their name to "Target" if there weren't trademark issues.

So I'm checking my email one last time tonight, in hopes that someone at Burning Man has developed an email teleportation device and decided at random to try it out on me. Or at least send photos or something. I'm checking my email and this banner comes up on Yahoo, it says, "Wal-Mart Organic: what's on your table?"

I choke. I gag. I laugh.

I mean, it's just so sighingly pathetic, so achingly gruesome, so much like putting a band-aid on a gushing amputation that Wal-Mart - of all the soul-devouring, union-busting, small-town-annhihilating corporate entities in the universe - would have the gall to go all uppity with their advertising. Like because you buy organics at Wal-Mart you are some eco-superhero who, together with your trusty bouncing yellow smiley face, attempts to destroy the evil expensive boutique organic purveyor with your thrifty know-how, and your ability to buy organic oranges, trashy bikinis, plastic shoes, and cheap particleboard furniture in one fell swoop.

Like somehow offering organic goods makes up for all the pathetic wages, the boarded up small town businesses, the sweating six-year-olds making shoes in Sai-Pan...oops, I mean the good ol' U S of A, the horrendous MPAA orgy wherein scads of eye-bleedingly wholesome Mary Kate and Ashley movies languish all anorexic and unwatched where there ought to be the unrated version of the 40 Year Old Virgin at the very least for chrissakes. Like do they actually believe that suddenly, because seven or eight years after the organics industry started to really take hold Wal-Mart runs furiously after the bandwagon and just barely manages to catch onto the bumper, that hordes of Prius-driving yoga moms are going to suddenly see the flourescent light and kick their cloth Whole Foods and Trader Joes bags to the curb?

Because really, how much more sustainable is a tasteless organic grape flown from Chile over a tasteless non-organic grape flown from Chile?

I'll stick to my CSA, thanks. Because I'll bet you dollars to donuts that if Wal-Mart even bothers to try to buy from him, they'll offer him their typical insulting below-market price in an attempt to add him to their hellish roster of cheap, disposable labor. Good thing he'd laugh in their faces.