(continued from my previous comment) And toward that end, I'll finish this communication by sharing with you CSERB's "Dirty Thirty" list of reasons to boycott Walmart's Neighborhood Market in Boulder. All of the points on the list, while expressed here in short, compressed form, are well documented by multiple sources.

"The “Dirty Thirty” –- Reasons to boycott Walmart’s Neighborhood Market in Boulder
Compiled 9/14 by the Coalition for Social and Environmental Responsibility in Boulder

Walmart…

1.Underpays workers, who can’t live on their wages.

2.Underschedules workers, who can’t earn enough to live on.

3.Underschedules full-time staff to avoid giving them benefits.

4.Irregularly schedules workers, preventing them from getting needed second jobs.

5.Isn’t transparent about its staff scheduling processes.

6.Kills jobs, local businesses, and communities with its predatory pricing.

7.Drives down the wages of workers at other nearby companies by paying its own workers so little.

8.Pollutes the environment, through incorrect storage of pollutants, illegal waste dumping, and poorly regulated foreign manufacturing.

9.Discriminates against female employees.

10. Discriminates against employees of color.

11. Hides from and lies to its shoppers.

12. Hides from and lies to the general public.

13. Hides from and lies to its staff.

14. Hides from and lies to its shareholders and other investors.

15. Hides from and lies to the government.

16. Puts dangerously high, injurious workload pressures on staff.

17. Steals earned wages from workers through not paying for hours worked, off-the-clock work, and falsification of records to eliminate overtime.

18. Forces older, full-time employees to work “flexible” shifts to get them to quit.

19. Intimidates, punishes, and retaliates against workers who exert their rights to question and protest company policies & practices.

20. Requires its managers to carry out policies & practices they know are immoral and/or illegal.

21. Depends on Third World sweat shops that force terribly paid workers to labor too many hours in poor, unsafe conditions.

22. Sells shrimp purchased from Thai fishing boats that use slave labor.

23. Mistreats independent-contractor truckers, forcing them to drive many more hours per day than is safe and legal, and without required breaks.

24. Bribed Mexican government officials to gain entry into new markets.

25. Creates extreme wealth inequality – the six Walton heirs together have more wealth than the bottom 28% of all American households combined.

26. Depends on taxpayers to support its poorly paid workers with federal assistance.

27. Cuts back on staff, resulting in less inventory and poorer service for customers and higher workload on remaining workers.

28. Hasn’t maintained the number of jobs they boasted about creating when they opened the Neighborhood Market in Boulder.

29. After announcing its plan to open the Boulder Neighborhood Market, lied to the city’s citizens, saying they’d never been asked whether they had such a plan.

30. Refuses to openly debate its critics, including Boulder activists.

I hope your weekend has started well, Carol, and that it continues in a good direction.

Matt

Carol, I'm sorry it's taken me this long to respond to your 11/12 letter responding to my 11/8 guest opinion. I'm also surprised that mine is the first comment on your piece; I would think you'd have been cheered by now by any number of the online commenters who regularly criticize my writings and CSERB's activities regarding Walmart.

I want to focus on your main points, which are found in the second and third paragraphs of your letter. First, the second paragraph:

"Did it occur to Mr. Nicodemus that perhaps the customers of Walmart do not want to be approached by protesters and have made that wish clear to the Walmart management? The CSERB's activities are not planned and conducted in secret and those who want to exercise their freedom to shop where they want are also free to express to a business owner that they do not want to be subject to what they may consider harassment."

That some Walmart customers would rather that CSERB activists not "bother" them with our protest and public information efforts has long been clear to us. I can imagine that some such shoppers might have complained to the Neighborhood Market management. Do you personally know of any who have done so?

CSERB understands that not everyone who patronizes the Diagonal Plaza mall will agree with our position, and that some will even feel "harrassed", but we are very careful, when going about our business, to not push our materials on individuals, instead simply offering them to mall patrons with a brief statement such as, "Would you like some information about Walmart?" We have an explicit policy that we don't speak negatively toward any Walmart shopper or worker. We fully understand that it's up to each individual to make their own choices about how they're going to relate to the world's largest retailer; our goal is to increase people's awareness about Walmart, about the full range of its highly problematic policies and practices, so that they'll understand what they'll be contributing to when spending there, and so that they can consider whether and how they themselves could join in pushing the company to be more socially and environmentally responsible.

Which brings us to your third paragraph:

"Does Mr. Nicodemus think shoppers have not heard the arguments CSERB is trying make? Is it not possible that shoppers might still choose to shop where prices are affordable in comparison to Trader Joe's or Whole Foods, even Safeway and King Soopers, and where value is a consideration? Do they not have the right to make their own judgments about their shopping choices, or does Mr. Nicodemus just assume that they are all ignorant of facts and must be educated? What arrogance."

In fact, from our experience, CSERB is certain that many people in our community have not heard about many of the ways that Walmart misbehaves around the world. We also know that many people, once they hear our complaints about the company, don't believe the established facts about how serious those misbehaviors are and how much opposition there is to them. For example, when we tell people that the company regularly intimidates and punishes associates for expressing grievances and joining in legal, organized efforts to gain redress for those grievances, e.g. through the efforts of groups such as OUR Walmart, the largest organization of Walmart workers working for changes in the company, many don't believe how widespread, unfair, and and illegal such practices are. Only when they learn from us that the federal government's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) charged the company with a host of unfair labor practices of just the sort we describe do many folks see that Walmart is doing things to its workers that deserve to be protested.

CSERB agrees with you completely that shoppers have the right to make their own choices about where they're going to spend their money, and we also well understand that those choosing to patronize Walmart have a variety of reasons for doing so. We just want to be sure that all Walmart shoppers, current and potential, be as knowledgeable as they can be about the company. (see continuation of this post in next comment below)

Thanks for asking, skipa. CSERB's protest was a great success. Though our turnout of five was at the low end of what we usually get for the monthly actions -- 10-12 would be better, now that most of our activity is restricted to the mall's drive-in entrances -- we were able to offer informational materials to patrons and discuss as they walked on the sidewalk that runs along the front of the Neighborhood Market and discuss Walmart issues with those who desired to do so, thus achieving one major goal. And thanks to the above opinion piece appearing the same day, we were able to reach out to all of the Camera's print-edition (18-20,000, I was just informed) and online readers, which includes not only current and potential Walmart shoppers but, equally importantly, the associates and management of the Neighborhood Market, not to mention Walmart's headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, who've certainly received it from the store's manager. As for what was accomplished beyond all that, we'll have to wait and see!

hp, have you ever witnessed CSERB protesting Walmart at the Diagonal Plaza mall? Have you spoken with shoppers there who've witnessed our demonstrations and/or chosen to take the leaflets we offered them? If not, I'm not sure how you're able to make the claim that our activities at the mall constitute harassment of anyone, unless you're defining the term harassment as protesting in support of a position with which you clearly disagree. Or do you see any form of public protest as being some sort of harassment of members of the public who are exposed to it?

I do thank you for the excellent piece on Occupy Madison's effort to help house the city's homeless in "tiny homes" and have already posted it on Occupy Boulder's Facebook page. One thing you might want to do: Ask the folks of Occupy Madison how they feel about Walmart and protests against it.

Are you a lawyer, Teddy? I'd be interested to discuss this matter further with you, where we can sit down with the ruling and look at it carefully. Let me know if you're interested.

Hi, MI, looks like you could benefit from a link I recommended to a commenter above: the result of my Google-searching on "conservatives who oppose Walmart": https://www.google.co.in/?gws_rd=ssl#q=conservati...
Here are folks protesting against exactly what you specify: WM not paying taxes and effectively being on the dole. I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on this after you've studied a number of these many sources.

j, is it one of your own "productive pursuits" to engage in such sarcastic communication? And do you treat all people who express views different from your own similarly? What is/are your purpose(s) for behaving in this way? Have you read any of CSERB's informational materials? Do you actually know what is on the leaflets we offer? Or do you make your overbroad generalizations based purely on the perceived source of those leaflets?

Most of the nearly universally recognized and accepted rights that workers and all other humans have with respect to corporate behavior were obtained by the actions of individual and organized employees who took stands and were willing to risk their livelihoods, and even their lives, who were angry protesters. (and did you intend your spelling of that word?)

gg, when you're ready to engage in actual conversation, presenting and defending your own views, then we can screech back and forth and maybe get somewhere. I will note, by the way, that one doesn't need to be left-leaning to oppose Walmart's policies and practices. For example, opponents of those who they see as taking advantage of government financial assistance programs to avoid working should be staunchly against Walmart's systemic practice of paying wages so low that they know their employees will have to depend on government assistance to get by. In fact, the company used to include in its new-employee orientations instruction on how to apply for food stamps. Another area in which conservative free-market proponents could find reason to challenge Walmart relates to the massive bribery of Mexican government officials that was carried out by company officials seeking to gain entry into that country's markets. Here's a 6/14 NYT piece about that: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/business/after-...
In addition, AP reported nearly two years ago, "In a Nov. 15 filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Wal-Mart said it was investigating potential violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in Brazil, China and India, among other markets." (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/23/walmart-india-corruption_n_2177025.html)
gg, as you well know, such corruption is, to say the least, out of sorts with the level-playing-field view of what makes for clean, textbook corporate capitalism.

I'll leave it to conservatives themselves to make further arguments, with the result of my Google search on "conservatives who oppose Walmart": https://www.google.co.in/?gws_rd=ssl#q=conservati...

Slim, do you consider it meaningful and important to be so insulting? What is/are your aim(s) in making such a post, particularly when you don't give any specifics about your disagreements with me and my "ilk" regarding human behavior and economics. Many writers on these pages speculate with language of certainty regarding other writers about whom they know little or nothing, but I won't do that. Instead, I'm simply asking you to explain your own human behavior, in your own words.

Attorante, if you were ignoring us, you wouldn't be speaking to us in this forum. Whatever you do, we certainly won't be going away. And if you educate yourself from many sources, I'm assuming that, given the impossibility of any source being completely objective, you actually take into account a variety of different "one-sided" presentations when coming to your conclusions. That would seem to imply that there's no reason to avoid CSERB's materials as you go through that process -- unless you have bias against us which leads you to reject what we have to say out of hand, without exploring our bases for saying it.

Your last line exhibits an attitude which I often encounter in the critical comments responding to my opinions published in the Camera: that protesters expressing opinions very different from your own are trying to "impose" their beliefs on you. Does that only apply to demonstrators who are using their voices, signs, and other physical means to present their thoughts and feelings? Or would it also include anyone expressing any opinion with which you disagree in any public setting, such as daily conversation or in the pages of a newspaper? Do you view newspaper columnists such as George Will or Paul Krugman as attempting to force readers to accept their arguments each time they write? And given that the message of any protest by anyone, be they of right, left, up, down, or some other orientation, will, by definition, be disagreed with by someone else, are you saying that all protesters fit into this category of "annoying flies that buzz around you" and should "go away"? I'm trying to understand you here.