On Why I Dislike Wal-Mart

I have several reasons why I dislike Wal-Mart. Here are a few:

1. It's too jam-packed full of merchandise. It's in the middle of aisles and covers ever inch possible of the ridiculously large stores.
2. The employees often (I'm sure not always) have no clue where merchandise is located (perhaps because there is so much merchandise).
3. The customers in Wal-Mart seem bent on being completely rude. They know they're in your way, in the middle of the aisle and that you need to get by. But they don't move. This isn't Wal-Mart's fault, it's just annoying.
4. They shut down smaller stores and become a monopoly.
5. Find more reasons at Wal-Mart Watch.

Those are just a few of the things I don't like. Add the following news to that list:

Wal-Mart Prevails in Case to Recover Health Costs
Deborah Shank stocked the shelves in a Wal-Mart until she was in a car accident with a tractor trailer that left her with brain damage and unable to walk. Her family sued the tractor trailer company and won $700,000. After paying all their legal fees, they had roughly $410,000 left over to pay for her medical expenses to take care of her for the rest of her life.

That's when Wal-Mart came in and decided to sue Shank and recover the $470,000 that her health insurance paid for medical expenses after the accident.

This is totally legal. It's call subrogation.

Okay, so it's legal. Big deal. Wal-Mart is the largest non-government employer in the U.S. I think, I think, they can live without that $470,000 that helped pay for a woman's medical expenses after a horrible traffic accident that left her without the ability to walk.

The good news is that after bloggers across the world, news shows and more berated Wal-Mart for their unfeeling and greedy lawsuit, they finally backed off. They won the case and all the appeals (although the Supreme Court declined to see the case), so they could have gotten away with it. But given the fact that Wal-Mart already has more than their fair share of PR problems, they decided to grow a friggin' conscience and not take the money. Or at least do what anyone with half a semester of Public Relations 101 could have told them would be the smart thing to do.