Free Republic

Louisiana’s social services department says it stripped food stamps from six people who deliberately overspent their monthly benefits when the electronic service was down in October. The Department of Children and Family Services said Monday it also is working to disqualify another 25 food stamp recipients. Several Louisiana retailers allowed food stamp recipients to make unlimited purchases on Oct. 12, when the electronic card system was down and balances couldn’t be checked. DCFS says some took advantage of the computer snafu and spent more than their available benefits. The department says it is pursuing 500 people who misspent $315,000. No...

Walmart recently unveiled their new concept big rig, called the WAVE. Short for Walmart Advanced Vehicle Experience, it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen on the road. Not only does it have a radical new appearance, but many of the internal features are also unprecedented. The steering wheel is positioned directly in the center of the cab, with a completely digital dashboard displayed on monitors on either side of the wheel. On the outside, the trailer is made of carbon fiber and sheds 4,000 pounds off the weight of traditional semi trucks, allowing it to haul more goods. The aerodynamic design...

You’ve never seen a transport truck quite like this. Walmart created a concept truck to maximize efficiency on the road, and the result is something that looks a little more spaceship than tractor-trailer. Walmart Corporate announced the project Feb. 17 during a meeting to report on progress with reaching the company’s sustainability goals. Chris Sultemeier, senior vice president and head of corporate transportation services for Wal-Mart, said the company also has agreed to buy 2,000 hydrogen-fueled forklift trucks for use in its U.S. and Canadian distribution centers, the Transport Times reported. In 2005, Wal-Mart set a goal of doubling the...

Kriston Charles Belinte Chee was shot to death at the Chandler Walmart. (Source: Arizona Department of Corrections) AP or the police made an interesting choice of words in describing the shooting that took place in the Chandler Walmart.  The AP story says: PHOENIX (AP) — A man who shot and killed another man inside a suburban Phoenix Walmart opened fire in self-defense, Chandler police said Monday.  According to Chandler police, Kyle Wayne Quadlin, 25, shot Kriston Charles Belinte Chee, 36, following a fight at a service counter Sunday afternoon. If Mr. Quadlin did not start the fight, it would...

<p>A man who shot and killed another man inside a suburban Phoenix Walmart opened fire in self-defense, Chandler police said Monday.</p> <p>According to Chandler police, Kyle Wayne Quadlin, 25, shot Kriston Charles Belinte Chee, 36, following a fight at a service counter Sunday afternoon.</p>

PHOENIX – Police in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler say a man shot inside a Walmart store during a fight has died. Chandler police spokesman Joseph Favazzo says that detectives reviewing surveillance video report that two people got into a fight, ending in a shooting around 4 p.m. Sunday.

President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is going down to Chavezville by repeating the same errors as Venezuela. The only way that she could mess up Argentina any further would be by actually starting a war with the UK. Last month, retailers agreed to freeze the prices of around 200 basic goods–ranging from detergent to milk to condoms–to fight inflation that economists say likely surpasses 30% annually. Obviously there’s a problem here. Passing price controls doesn’t mean that the products will actually be available. At the time, retailers said the agreement could lead to supply problems if manufacturers of certain goods...

A group of Democrats are urging Walmart to follow CVS Caremark and discontinue selling tobacco products. The seven Democrats said Walmart, the nation’s biggest retailer, is also the nation’s biggest seller of cigarettes. “We recognize the legality of selling and profiting from tobacco products; however, Walmart’s position as the nation’s largest retailer of any kind puts your company in a unique position to contribute to the health and well-being of all Americans<” the Democrats said in a letter to the company. The letter’s signatories included Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the number two Democrat in the Senate. The letter stats that...

Is this an employee Obama wants to pay over $10 an hour to do a job?

Hundreds of stores across the nation are closing as some of America’s most famous retailers struggle to stay in business. The country is facing what CNBC has labeled a tsunami of store closings and blogger Michael Snyder has called a retail apocalypse. JC Penney, which lost $586 million in three months in 2013, is planning to close 33 stores in 19 states and lay off 2,000 people. JC Penney’s stock has lost 84 percent of its value since February 2012. Sears has decided to shut down its flagship store in Downtown Chicago, and it has closed 300 stores in the...

NORMAN, Okla. – A 17-year-old is facing charges after he tricked three Walmart stores out of nearly $30,000. Police aren’t releasing his name because he is a juvenile, but Norman police finally caught up to him Jan. 30 in Norman and arrested him. The teen stole from the Walmart stores in Dec. after conning managers into believing he worked there. “You would think a store manager would catch on to something like that,” said shopper Vernon Boyce. After reading the police report, you realize no one noticed or suspected anything. The report says at a Moore Walmart he “…acted as...

Wal-Mart stores and its Sam's Club chain are apparently hurting from the cuts in the federal food stamp program that went into effect in early November. The impact from the government's reduction in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits had a much greater effect on the world's largest retailer than originally expected by the company. Combined with consumer fears about the economy and winter storms that also hurt store business nationwide, the cuts made a bad situation for Wal-Mart even worse, according to a statement from Wal-Mart Chief Financial Officer Charles Holley carried by the Associated Press. The estimated $5...

Companies blame all sorts of things for profit warnings, real and imagined. There’s at least some reason to believe Wal-Mart Stores WMT -1.14% when it blames food stamp cuts and bad weather. First, the assertion that food-stamp cuts impacted the company’s bottom line: On Nov. 1, the Great Recession boost to the food-stamp program — known as the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program — expired. That meant as much as a 5.5% reduction in benefits. A family of four, for example, would get $36 a month less.

(CNN) -- The White House has secured commitments from some of the nation's largest companies for a plan to boost hiring of the long-term unemployed. "What we have done is to gather together 300 companies, just to start with, including, some of the top 50 companies in the country, companies like Walmart, and Apple, Ford and others, to say let's establish best practices," President Barack Obama told CNN Chief Washington Correspondent Jake Tapper in an exclusive interview. "Because they've been unemployed ... so long, folks are looking at that gap in the resume and they're weeding them out before these...

The little girl sprinted from the bedroom, her bare feet slapping the cold terrazzo floor. Halting, she looked up at her mother, sitting on a stool in the kitchen. "Mommy, are you going to work today?" "Yes," Yanira Avezuela told her daughter, Kassidy Russell. The girl, 5, shrugged. "Tomorrow, I'm off," said Avezuela, smiling. "Yay," the girl shouted. Her braids bouncing, she hopped back to the bedroom. Kassidy's question is one she could not have asked her mother before last month. But at that moment before 9 a.m. Wednesday, a badge hung from Avezuela's bedroom doorknob. Over a green background,...

Retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT: Quote) will lay off about 2,300 employees at its Sam's Club warehouse division, according to media reports on Friday. The job cuts, representing about 2 percent of Sam's Club workforce, are reportedly part of Walmart's efforts to improve efficiency at the business. Walmart thus joins other retailers who are laying off employees after a lacklustre holiday season. The layoffs would reportedly target a combination of salaried assistant managers and hourly employees. All affected workers will get 60 paid days to find another job at the company and if unsuccessful, will be eligible for severance....

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it's eliminating 2,300 workers at its Sam's Club division as it reduces the ranks of middle managers in a bid to be more nimble. The layoffs, which cut 2 percent of the membership club's U.S. employee count of about 116,000, mark the largest since 2010 when the Sam's Club unit laid off 10,000 workers as it moved to outsource food demonstrations at its stores.

Walmart announced on Friday that about 2,300 Sam’s Club employees would be laid off, the latest in a drumbeat of retail job cuts to start off the new year. Bill Durling, a Sam’s Club spokesman, said the layoffs would target a combination of salaried assistant managers and hourly employees. Certain positions, like telephone attendants, will be eliminated. “We realized we had pretty much the same club structure whether a club had $50 million in revenue or $100 million in revenue,” Mr. Durling said of the distribution of assistant managers. “What we’re trying to do is balance our resources.” Sam’s Club...

Excerpted from "Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA" Imagine a world without the New York Times, Fox News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and countless other tools used by the 1 percent to rule and fool. In a socialist society run by and for the working people it represents, the mega-monopolies like Walmart, Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, and the corporations that run the tightly controlled “mainstream media” will be a thing of the past. It’s not news that the major US media are run by and for big business, or that the major media companies are themselves big businesses. Twenty years ago,...

Brooklyn - Council Member Inez Barron is opposed to her Council district being the site for Denny’s Restaurant reported new location on Pennsylvania Ave between Linden Boulevard and Stanley Avenue. “It is insulting for Denny’s to seek to come into a community that is Black and Latino. Just as we fought successfully to keep Wal-Mart with a similar history of discrimination and low wage workers with minimal benefits from coming to our community, we will wage the battles necessary to keep Denny’s out,” Councilmember Barron says. "Denny’s racist and discriminatory past cannot be ignored. In 1994, Denny’s paid out an...