Month: May 2001
3000 stores, 925,000 employees, and a new location every two days
“Wal-Mart operates on a saturation strategy. They place stores so close together that they become their own competition. Once everyone else is wiped out, they’re free to thin out their own stores. Wal-Mart currently has over 390 empty stores on the market today. This is a company that changes stores as casually as you or…
The first ones to move were the Jews, then the Italians, then the Poles
“We came here in ’49. We came on a boat to Boston, and from Boston by train to New York, and I lost all my jewelry that I had in my pocketbook in the taxicab here. They said to put all your jewelry on, because you will pay duties. It was not true, nobody looked.…
They have two options: either they work, or they go back to jail
“Just like many Americans in the 1950s willfully averted their eyes from the realities of segregation, now we are reluctant to face the social consequences of 2 million men and women behind bars. Sure, we revel in the dramatic reduction in the crime rate. But with most prisons in rural areas, we have the luxury…
What they’re thinking about in Kansas City
“A young man died recently in my front yard. All I know is that he was 22, his automobile was scattered all over my yard and his blood pooled at the bottom of my maple tree.”
It doesn’t want to be the best in the world, but my food cannot be that bad
“Mr. Grimes had done more than reduce a chef to tears. In 1,052 words, he had thrown a $3.5 million business venture employing 75 people into jeopardy.”
Do I win $20 if I hit her?
“With a constant media contingent devoted almost exclusively to chronicling every last detail of her life in Washington, Mrs. Clinton has come to resemble one of the small plastic animals in a game of Whack-a-Mole.”
They tricked us and said capitalism is bad, but what did socialism accomplish?
“In the United States the children can’t play in the street because they’ll be stolen. Here they can go to the movies, to the beach, because nothing like that happens. There they kill them to steal their organs.”
White trash has a tendency to make itself easy to identify, don’t it?
“I’d advise against it. It’s not a good idea. They’re liable to get beat up. Last year there were two blacks in the alcohol-free area, and when the sun went down, people started saying things like, ‘Those two trees there look mighty sturdy to me.’ They got out of there pretty quick.”
We’re not sure what Clintonesque is, but there’s lots of it
“It is nearly impossible to turn on a television set or radio in Mexico and not find Fox. He travels constantly: next stops, Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing. He often gives several speeches a day. His predecessor, Ernesto Zedillo, disliked public attention and rarely held news conferences. But Fox has saturated the public consciousness here the…
You’d've thought there’d be some realization that Bush doesn’t have a mandate
“A president more sensitive to his electoral predicament would not have chosen a right-winger like John Ashcroft for his cabinet. He would have been more careful to review the actions of the previous administration so as to avoid embarassing news stories such as the one about repealing regulations against arsenic in the water. He would…