These jobs are entry level jobs where you first learn how the real world works. Then, having learned a bit about the real world, you move onto a real job. I’ve held most of the jobs in that list at some point in life. Sales can be a lucrative job. My dad was a salesman, and up until a year or two before I graduated from high school, he was maxing out his social security payments in September or October. He started as a grocery store clerk (small town store, no union card) and eventually started working a chip and pretzel delivery route, before making what to me was the big score of working for a regional baked goods delivery outfit (being able to go out and select desert if when we ate the last ones in the house was really important to me back then). But he never could have survived as a retail clerk, even in a grocery store.

The sorts of jobs that are starter jobs should be routinely vacated so that the next group of people who’ve never had a real job before can take them. They need to be jobs where the benefit/risk ratio is profitable, and since the risk for entry level is always high, low wage is the way to balance the odds. It isn’t demeaning, it’s the way things ought and have to be.

You are floating it out there that WalMart is cheating its employees. But if they go union, the benefits go up, and the prices do too.

It ain’t free.

This one’s gonna be tough for me because I’m a pretty mercenary sort and money is one of two things that I’ve never let ideology much interfere with.

If heath insurance is your issue, becoming a communist isn’t the solution. Stop the stovepiping between states, allow some portability between jobs, do some entry-level sort of catastrophic insurance for workers who are temporary or transient. I can go on awhile.

What happens is that people just settle into these jobs, don’t get promoted, and become malcontents. Before long they’re walking around with UFCW interest cards in their pocket,prosetlyzing, and wondering why management doesn’t like them.

Worked for J.C. Penney first as a sales associate, then Mgmt. Trainee, and later a Dept. Manager as my first real job after I got married and gave up my more adventurous ways.

Retail is a very, very good entre to the workforce for young people. The standard late four hour or so shifts starting at five or six pm allow you to go to school and make a little money. You learn what actually going to work is about. Only a miniscule percentage of the people who go to work in retail should stay there. If you have the knack for it, department and section managers make pretty good money, store managers in good locations make real good money if they can make their numbers. If they don’t make their numbers, they don’t stay Store Managers long.

Anybody who considers “clerking” in a retail store as a lifetime career is simply a loser. You are never going to make any money to speak of and the hours are simply awful. If you have no more ambition than that, I have no interest in your well being. This, of course, is the base of the retail clerks unions; the person who thinks they should be able to have a bountiful lifestyle on a job that simply can’t pay much and allow the business to remain competitive.

Pres Obama keeps talking about the taking care of the “middle class” with his policies. How nice. How hypocritical! Wal Mart has proven to be a haven for middle class shoppers through its low prices for food and other products. Its success with selling food has been at the expense of major supermarket chains which are all unionized, thus forcing higher labor costs…and higher prices. These chains have been putting pressure on the unions to organize Wal Mart in order to equal the playing field, instead of forcing unions to balance their labor costs with the competition.

I truly believe that Pres. Obama, the democratic party and their subsidiaries: organized labor, the trial lawyers, environmental and consumer protection radicals, Hollywood elitists, and their publicity department, the Main Stream Media are trying to bankrupt all of us in order for the “new order” to be implemented. Removing the advantage of “middle class” shopping havens like Wal Mart is a step toward government control of its citizen’s lives.

Thus the need for speedy passage of legislation to implement his stated goals is necessary before the public becomes aware of the details. Remember “the Devil is in the Details.” We have already seen several democrats beginning to question Pres Obama’s objectives, perhaps because they are getting heat from their constituencies and as more of the “middle class” begin to educate themselves on what could be in store for them down the road, other politicians will join in the opposition. A politicians first objective in office is getting re-elected, not changing the world. Thus, when an elected member of Congress begins to smell defeat, they will do what is necessary to ensure their job security.

In the end, it is up to the electorate to begin to put the heat on their elected officials and up to the new media to educate the electorate before they are silenced by this administration. I don’t want to wake up one morning and find out I no longer have any decisions to make, as the government will be making them for me.

Don’t know about Target. Good question, though, as I shop there too.

I will try hard to avoid WM totally if they unionize. It’s a price thing and a principle thing.