text: If you're going to feel guilty, put that feeling into action. This is anecdotal evidence, but I have seen what a terrible effect Wal-Mart has had on the small Texas town where I grew up in the 70s. Most of the family-owned retail shops have closed; downtown is in ruins - there's no good excuse for kids to hang out there the way they used to. Money that used to be reinvested in the community gets paid to a corporate conglomerate with draconian labor practices and wages that are so low that the U.S. taxpayer has subsidizes Wal-Mart employees who don't get benefits packages.\n\nThe place is sterile, the employees cultish. There's no specialized knowledge built up in individual departments. When there was a record shop on Hiram Street, the man who ran it and the kids who worked for him knew about music. The tire store salesman knew about tires. No one at Wal-Mart has that kind of institutional expertise. They're all about being low-priced and friendly, but they're completely removed from the products that they sell. And it's all sanitized, scripted, and carefully censored so that nobody gets his/her sensibilities challenged. \n\nWorst of all, I think Wal-Mart has played a pivotal role in making people believe that they need things they don't need, and want things they don't have any use for. The whole store is a tease, a come-on without a pay-off. (In this respect, Wal-Mart is no different from other players in modern consumer culture; except that Wal-Mart has found a way to destabilize and manipulate people who really don't have very much into wanting more and having even less. It's like a casino in that respect.)\n\nWhere are all the Wal-Schools and Wal-Computers and Wal-Vaccination programs? The Wal-Institute for Public Health? It may be my ignorance in play here, but the Walton family has been fabulously wealthy for a very long time, but they don't seem to have developed a public conscience. They hide behind the good-old-boy image of their late founder. But it's time they started giving back. They've helped destroy a landscape in my hometown that's irreplaceable.