Dang it's cold now....

[Rastus]

Growing up in the south there were chain gangs in every state working on the highways picking up trash, cleaning ditches, whatever.  Also...up until maybe the 70's, in Louisiana you could get a low security prisoner from the state pen, agree to room and board him and agree to turn him in if he ran.  So there were quite a few just in my small town who were happy to work in a field until their term was up to get out of the pen.

Anything, not just wally world, that you buy from China may have been slave labor.  Some of the worst I saw were the Chinese working the people on Guam in garment factories.  I don't know about the wally world slavery...but I do know ordinary people in the company early on held shares and became wealthy from it.  Maybe they were overzealous...I dunno.  One of my sons worked for Walmart for 6 years and there was no slavery.  Good pay for what he was doing with good benefits.  So I don't know about walmart slavery I just know what one of my sons and 3 or 4 or his friends saw and there was no slavery back 10-15 years ago.

[Big Frank]

When Sam Walton died in 1992 and his kids took over the business, they became union busters and slave drivers. He would die of shame if he wasn't already dead. They've remained the richest family in the U.S. for several consecutive years, with a net worth of over $440 billion. If it wasn't ill-gotten gains, I would say good for them. But the company started doing things like locking stores and warehouses at night "for security", and not letting people out until all the work was done, even though they weren't being paid for the last 2 or 3 hours. When you get paid by the hour, and not a salary, you're supposed to be paid for all the hours you work. And they were refusing people bathroom breaks and lunch breaks too. I'm sure they didn't do this to every single person at every single location, but they stole billions of dollars from their workers, by making them work for free. Walmart revenue was $680.99 billion in 2025, and Sam's Club had $90.2 billion in sales. Their family is making $771,190,000,000 per year, more than the Gross Domestic Product of about 170 different countries! There are only 21 or 22 countries in the whole world that make more money than the Walton family. They can afford to pay their workers what they owe them, but it's obviously cheaper to hire lawyers to fight one multi-million dollar lawsuit after another. F**k Walmart!

[Big Frank]

On topic.