Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.
508 is a show about Worcester. This week, Scott Schaeffer-Duffy and Brendan Melican discuss and debate an upcoming anti-gun protest at the local Walmart.
[display_podcast]
Audio: Download the mp3 or see more formats.
Twitter | Facebook | Subscribe with iTunes | Contact Info
You can watch 508 Fridays at 7pm on WCCA TV13.
Tommy Colletta talks with Shannon Senior of Worcester First and Al Norman of Sprawl Busters. (The first couple minutes have sound trouble, not sure why.)
This week, the discussion begins with honeybees (here’s the article I mention) and Bill Richardson’s ad choices. We then talk with Shannon Senior, one of the leaders of the campaign against a proposed Worcester Wal-Mart.
Hosts: me, Janine Duffy, Jim Henderson.
Recording with TalkShoe continues to be fun and challenging. My controls died about halfway through this episode, and there’s a long silence at the end when I restarted the controls so I could click “Terminate episode.”
Holy cow, Shannon! Good job!
T&G: Appeal stalls planned Wal-Mart: Quinsigamond Village abutters fault officials:
A group of abutters has temporarily put the brakes on the planned Wal-Mart Supercenter in Quinsigamond Village.
Three abutters to the “Worcester Crossing†shopping center development, to be built on 44 acres along the Blackstone River, have filed an administrative appeal with the Zoning Board of Appeals, claiming the Planning Board did not adhere to the city’s site plan review standards when it approved the first phase of the project in March.
Maybe this will buy some time. That’s just what the opposition needs. The fact that any effort has “put the brakes” on this thing at this point is a big surprise.
Video: Shannon Senior and John Harvey talk Wal-Mart.
WorcesterFirst.org has some action items for people concerned about Wal-Mart’s plans to move into Worcester.
Don’t get me wrong. I still think bringing Wal-Mart to the city would be, economically, a step in the wrong direction. But after meeting with some folks about this last night, I no longer feel a free-floating anxiety. I don’t have a lot of hope at this point, but I have some actions I can take.
For those who are interested, you can read the planning proposal.
I regret that the time has come to tag a post both “Worcester” and “Wal-Mart.”
A 209,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter is part of a shopping center planned on 44 acres in Quinsigamond Village where U.S. Steel once operated foundries along the Blackstone River.
I consider myself to be the single biggest proponent of hard core, blood thirsty capitalism this side of Iowa, but Wal-Mart still manages to make me ill.
I’ll be blogging this issue over at Worcester Activist.
It only applies to employers with over $1 billion in annual sales and stores of 90,000 square feet or more. It’s aimed at Wal-Mart, but I’m not sure who else would fall into that category; the article doesn’t say if it actually applies to any existing businesses in the city.
The wage under this ordinance is $10.00, plus $3.00 in fringe benefits. Much better than minimum wage, but still under the $15.00 (under the table, presumably) that day-laborers in Agoura Hills, California are getting.
Also, of course, it only applies within the city limits; the article notes that Wal-Mart recently opened a store just outside the boundary of the city.
Incidentally, I had no idea Chicago had 50 people on its City Council. Wow!
A regression analysis shows that the presence of Wal-Mart in a county increases family poverty.
Editor’s note: This is our 100th post.
In the heart of the dead (as advertised) but employees can’t find it, the inventory number is missing, the bar code won’t scan, ‘Price check on aisle one nineteen!’ they have promised again and again so we are here to collect: health, happiness, fulfillment, quality and especially savings in the isles of the only home we know.
The statement also applies to the 49 hours I had previously spent at Wal-Mart. Despite the ironic tone, those Wal-Mart pieces were an experiment in compliance. In Wal-Mart, I endeavored to accept the offers of consumer culture—health, happiness etc.—as if they were made in earnest. I decided that the intense, extreme, adventurous and sublimely happy life displayed in product advertisements was the thing for me.
Wal-Mart was a perfect site for the quest because it is the ultimate experience of abundant promise and dismal reality: the products versus the customers. There, amidst a crippling one billion choices, the perfect item is said to lurk; as customers our mission is to find it. My visit to Wal-Mart was an act of total compliance with that mission. The stipulations I brought were a sincere expectation of achieving that goal and a preference for process over product. In the end I felt successful for having made good on their false promises.
On the one year anniversary of the 49 hours I spent at Wal-Mart, I endeavored to colonize another modern fixture, the abandoned city building. Beginning on the evening of Thanksgiving 2002, I operated under the following procedure:
Continue reading “49 hours at Wal-Mart vs. 39 hours in an abandoned building”
