An Ode to the Wal-Mart Spin Doctors


It's a grey New Year's Eve but warm, so I took the dogs out for a quick 40 minute run down in the river valley after work (fell once on the ice grazing my right buttock while gingerly inching down a rather steep, icy hill), and then came home and sat down to watch the evening news. Oddly enough, it wasn't the lead stories about the latest victims of drunk drivers and pre-pubescent gang bangers that caught my eye, but rather a commercial for Wal-Mart.

The Wal-Mart commercial had all these warm and fuzzy recollections of childhood by your typical mosaic cross-section of adults, and the last bit is a girl of roughly six years of age stating "coming home" as her favorite memory. Then the logos come on for Wal-Mart stating "proud sponsors of..." then the Children's Miracle Network logo comes up. Now I don't want to slam Wal-Mart simply because they are a big box store, but how classless can you be to use the fact that you donate a small percentage of their profit to a children's charity as a self-perpetuating commercial? I mean really, what would we think of individuals if they walked around boasting of their charitable donations: "Hi, I'm Real-E and I gave $25 to the Breast Cancer Society, $20 to the Battle of the Badges, $100 to Doctor's Without Borders..."???!

THEN, Wal-Mart goes on about the importance of "families in their ads.... Are these the same families that were forced to man the tills and aisles of the local Wal-Mart over the holidays to ensure that folks could consume, consume, consume 24/7????!

God bless the spin doctors!