Including audio version by Jim Goad!
Black People of Walmart

1,731 words / 11:58

Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”

In the summer of 2009, a website called “People of Walmart” debuted and, like a fever blister sprouting under the hot August sun, it enjoyed a few moments of Internet virality. Its stock in trade was to feature reader-submitted photos of lumpy, fat, trashy, tacky, stupid, déclassé, weird — and almost entirely white — Americans trudging through those giant hollow warehouses of depressing consumerism that are target-marketed toward consumers of meager means. The site gained its popularity through the tried-and-true ritual defamation of low-income white Americans. In a 2017 listicle called “14 Funniest People of Walmart Photos,” all 14 of the “winners” — i.e., the biggest losers — were white.

But it all started very humbly in 1951 with a little “five-and-dime” store called Walton’s 5-10 in Bentonville, Arkansas, nestled so deeply in the Ozark Mountains that the bluebirds would probably scream if they ever saw a black person. By 1962, brothers Sam and James “Bud” Walton — both of them undeniably as white as the puffy clouds that scoot high over the Ozarks — founded the Wal-Mart company and opened the first official Wal-Mart store in nearby Rogers, Arkansas. (The company no longer hyphenates its name, probably because they operate on such a razor-thin profit margin that they decided hyphens were too expensive, so what was originally “Wal-Mart” is now the more economical “Walmart.”)

The Walton brothers slowly extended their creamy white tentacles from Arkansas to Missouri, Kansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma before lurching out into other benighted flyover states such as Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee in the early 1970s. Throughout the 1980s, Sam Walton combined his dogged determination for undercutting the competition — epitomized in the original Walmart slogan “Always Low Prices. Always.” — with his fondness for acquiring cheap goods from China to the point that his brainchild overcame mega-markets such as Kmart and Sears by 1990.

By 2002, Walmart’s reach had ballooned to the point where it was listed for the first time as America’s largest corporation — by total revenue, not total net income. It is now the world’s largest company in terms of total revenue, but it falls to 29th according to net income because its business model relies on cheap goods at cheap prices sold to mostly downtrodden people who can only afford cheap things.

As of late last year, the international Walmart empire boasted over 10,000 stores in two dozen nations operating under a plethora of names depending on the country. At the moment, there are no Walmart Supercenters or Sam’s Clubs on the Moon, but give it a year or two.

For much of its history, Walmart remained mostly a rural and suburban phenomenon. And since it originally expanded from the Ozarks of Arkansas and Missouri down into the Deep South, the chain invariably had to encounter black people whether it wanted to or not. These days, when it is estimated that 90% of Americans live within ten miles of a Walmart store, this also means that armchair sociologists such as myself, unconstrained by the modern pieties, feel compelled to discuss the Black People of Walmart.

In his 1992 autobiography Made in America — which was published less than a month after he died — Sam Walton made clear that he was not one of them dadgum bleedin’-heart liberals ready to shed money like tears upon the needy: “We feel very strongly that Wal-Mart really is not, and should not be, in the charity business . . . [because] any debit has to be passed along to somebody — either shareholders or our customers.” And for much of Walmart’s existence, it cultivated a reputation as a place where working-class white Christian Republicans could buy cheap ammo and cheaper hot dogs free from the snobby gaze of disdainful and college-educated store clerks.

But nothing wholesome lasts forever, and these days, corporations that don’t go woke are forced to go broke, and Walmart gradually transitioned to Wokemart. In the early 2000s, the company added discrimination based on sexual orientation to its official list of worker no-nos. In 2018, it partnered with the disgusting pelican-faced lesbo Ellen Degeneres to roll out a new line of “women’s” apparel.

On June 5, 2020, as the Summer of Floyd had just started kicking into full gear, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon bowed down before the greasy, scaly, phantom phallus of black America and gave it a slobbering blowjob:

The murder of George Floyd is tragic, painful, and unacceptable. His death is not an isolated event. We remember Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many other Black Americans who have been killed. . . . Our nation has failed to fully acknowledge and resolve the root issues. Slavery, lynching, the concept of separate but equal and the other realities from our past have morphed into a set of systems today that are all too often, unjust. That’s why we see so many people mobilized and that’s why we see a diverse group of Americans joining the protest. . . . Walmart has over 340,000 Black and African American associates in the United States. . . . Overwhelmingly, people are hurting. There is an intense sense of pain, fatigue, and frustration. Let me say clearly to our Black and African American associates and communities, we hear you.

A week later, apparently fretting that he hadn’t groveled enough, he issued a statement to Walmart workers titled “Advancing Our Work on Racial Equity”:

Overwhelmingly, people expressed their support for the stance our company is taking on racial equity and on the commitment we made to . . . help replace the structures of systemic racism, and build in their place frameworks of equity and justice that solidify our commitment to the belief that, without question, Black Lives Matter. . . . Of course, we need to go further in hiring Black and African American associates across all levels and positions.

That’s an incredibly wordy and roundabout way of saying, “Please don’t loot our stores!”

You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.

Regardless, it didn’t stop black people from looting Walmarts across the country.

If you search the terms “Walmart looting” or “Walmart looters” on sites such as YouTube, Bitchute, and Rumble, you can watch hours of videos featuring live-action footage of mostly urban mobs swarming and looting and wilding and terrorizing and acting a damn fool and leaving nothing but destruction in their wake, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a single white face amid the oceans of rolling chocolate lava.

Looting really hurts a cut-rate megastore’s bottom line.

The nation’s blandest and most successful mega-retailer recently made headlines when it announced it was closing its remaining two stores in Portland, Oregon and drawing the blinds on four outlets in Chicago — leaving only four Walmarts in the Windy City.

The Zombie Death Cult Fentanyl Antifa Amputee Communist Rich Kid city of Portland, Oregon shuttered its remaining pair of Walmarts late last month, but since there are hardly any black people in The World’s Least Racist City, it’s not very relevant to this article, but I will seize this fleeting opportunity to mention that I think it would be a good idea to move every black person in America to Portland. According to my estimations, there are at least two million surplus blacks here in Atlanta alone. The traffic here is horrible, and the blacks never use their turn signals. Send them all to Portland at once! The Rose City will become vehemently racist quicker than you can say, “Jim Crow.”

According to Walmart’s official statement for why it shut down four Chicago outlets this past Sunday:

The simplest explanation is that collectively our Chicago stores have not been profitable since we opened the first one nearly 17 years ago — these stores lose tens of millions of dollars a year, and their annual losses nearly doubled in just the last five years.

The mega-chain only closed down one “Supercenter,” and it was in Chi-Town’s Chatham neighborhood, which is 97% black. The three others that shut down were the much smaller Walmart “Neighborhood Markets.” One was in Kenwood, which is 66% black and 21% white. Another was in Little Village, which is 81% Hispanic and 12% black. The third was in Lakeview, which is 76% white and has almost no blacks.

Of course, this didn’t stop Chicago’s Official Blacks from asking, “It’s because we’re black, isn’t it?”

Would you be any happier if I told you it was precisely because you’re black? Methinks not!

“I’m incredibly disappointed that Walmart, a strong partner in the past, has announced the closing of several locations throughout the south and west sides of the city,” groused outgoing Chicago Mayoratrix Lori Lightfoot, whose face is an incredible disappointment to everyone who values beauty and elegance. “Unceremoniously abandoning these neighborhoods will create barriers to basic needs for thousands of residents.”

Maybe those thousands of residents in those neighborhoods should have thought twice before unceremoniously abandoning any pretense of civility.

Likewise, Chicago Mayor-Elect Brandon Johnson, responding to last weekend’s swarming of the city by black yoofs seeking to beat the shit out of white women, seems to believe that corporations “loot” the hardworking black taxpayers of Chicago, all eight or nine of them:

You can’t condone the looting that corporations continue to do every single day when they take tax dollars from black, brown and white folks all over the city of Chicago so that they can turn a profit. . . . That type of looting has to be disrupted as well. That’s what we’re calling for in this moment.

At this moment, Mr. Johnson, what I’m calling you is a jerkoff.

The Chicago Sun-Times quotes a fat black woman (sorry for the redundancy) named Myesha McGarner, who seems to believe that Walmart was stolen from the South Side rather than the fact that it decided to leave the South Side after having too many items stolen from its shelves:

Neighborhoods that are impoverished and underserved continue to have things close down that they need to be better. Another store closing down on the South Side. What else is new? They’re always taking stuff from the South Side.

Ms. McGarner, whom I’m certain is descended from the Kilkenny McGarners, is welcome to offer evidence that South Siders contribute more to society than they take from society in government handouts — and from the hapless shelves of Walmart when caught up in the blunt primate ecstasy of urban-mob frenzy.

And I invite any “professional” sociologist to explain to me how it’s possible for anyone to live in a “food desert” when they weigh more than a Congolese hippo.

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