I'm going to be a rebel.

I am going to think for myself.

There is a movement afoot to protest Walmart (yet again) by having people NOT shop at Walmart for a day (their 49th anniversary).

I'm not going to join that protest. Why? Because I can think for myself and in my own research I have learned a few things.

1. Telling people to not shop somewhere for a day DOES FUCK ALL!

For those not familiar with British expressions, "Does Fuck All" is roughly the same as "Doesn't do Jack Shit"

You hear about these protests a lot for Gas Stations and their parent companies (or at least their Gas Suppliers). So you declare Wednesdays as "Do Not Buy Gas Day!". You want to know what happens? People will either fill up the Tuesday before so they don't run out, or they look at their gas gauges and decide that they can make it till Thursday. So all the gas that isn't sold on Wednesday is STILL being sold during the week.

What have we done? Not a fucking thing. All you have done is created a statistical anomaly that has no net change in the monthly financial figures. The same amount of gasoline is sold that month and so no one at Exxon, Shell, BP, etc is going to go "HOLY FUCKING SHIT! NO ONE BOUGHT GAS ON WEDNESDAY!!! THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!"

If they even SEE the anomaly, they're going to look at it, look at the monthly number, shrug and move on.

This is the same for Walmart. Since they sell groceries at the supercenters, people will either buy their groceries the day before or the day after. Again all you are doing is creating an interesting statistical blip that the average person is not going to see. Sure some local level managers might sweat it for a little while but when they see he weekly totals they're going to shrug and move on.

In fact that may even backfire on the consumers as the management might think "Oh well, Wednesdays are a crap day so I'll bring in less people to run the registers and you'll get to sit in the one open lane with 30 people  with full baskets in front of you and your one item.

2. Walmart is not the culprit in the death of the Mom and Pop stores. Take my specialty here. Computers. Mom and Pop repair shops are folding. Is it because of Walmart? No. It's because of the computer companies making computers so cheap that it's cheaper to buy a new one rather than pay to have it cleaned of the virus. I can get a computer for $300 with a monitor. That same computer costs $300 at HP.com

Same price in both places. So...if Walmart is not dictating the price of that item, how is their fault?

Do you want to know what's killing the Mom and Pop? The consumer is. Yes...YOU. Remember pre-ordering Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows from Amazon so it would be sitting on your doorstep when you got home from work the day it was released?

Or "Damnit! I let the magic smoke out of my camera. I need a new one. Ooh! There's a feller on Ebay that has it for $60 cheaper than I can get it from the stores. It's reconditioned but has the same warranty as a new one. WooHoo! Where's my PayPal password?"

Before the age of the Internet you had to find a store that might carry a product. For example a Bodhrán (Celtic Hand Drum). You would have to look in the Yellow Pages for the local music stores, go to them, have them look up in their supplier's catalogs, maybe have to wait until they call them, check around to a few more stores, and eventually put down a deposit and have them order one with their next shipment.

So you might have to wait a few weeks.

Today you just hit Google.com, click on the "Shopping" link, and search for "Bodhrán" and get dozens of places that you can order one and have it shipped overnight to you.

Who needs a real life music store? Who needs a real life book store? Who needs glass-front stores when the world is your shopping mall?

And I am not judging. I am equally guilty of this. With my iPhone, my first thought when I can't find something at the stores or if I discover a need when I'm somewhere else is to fire up the browser and see if I can find it online.

Walmart is not to blame. It's the fact that with the new technology, the old paradigm of the single-purpose store run by mom-and-pop is not a viable way to survive in this day and age unless you have some way to attract people to the store. Either by having something that you really want to talk to a knowledgeable person about (certain crafts) or is something that is needed that the big box stores do not carry and many people can't wait the 24 hours for it to arrive.

3. Walmart's prices. I'm poor. If it was just me, my salary would have me living comfortably. But I have a wife and I a step daughter and her beau living with us as well as two other step children who come over and eat flipping great amounts of food. That's upwards of 6 people at a meal and I'm the only income.

I can't afford to protest Walmart. Basket vs Basket I'm looking at a savings of $75 by shopping at Walmart than at any other grocery store. Many people in the country at this moment in time with the economy in the toilet are in my boat. One income, possibly vastly reduced than what it once was, supporting a family.

That $75 savings a trip may mean the difference between paying a bill or not paying a bill for a family. That $75 a trip saved over the year may just make Christmas a little more merry.

So with my research I decided that I am not going to be a mindless sheep following the flock. This protest is pointless, will achieve nothing, and is just one more example of the mindless mental masturbation of the slack-tivists out there who thought it up.

Want to help the economy? Let's get off out our asses and pressure our elected officials to stop letting American Companies outsource every-fucking-thing to the third world. Pressure our congress men and women to start putting import taxes on anything that was not made in the borders of the US. To pressure our leaders to try and come up with incentives to bring jobs back to the US.

Sitting on our flabby asses and clicking a link is not going to do a fucking thing for anything or anybody. Clicking that "Join us in our protest to stop clubbing baby seals" link isn't going to stop some assclown with a tire-iron from bashing in the head of a baby seal. Clicking that "people are starving in [insert third world nation]" link is not going to feed one grain of rice to anyone.

You want to do some good? Stop being a slacktivist and actually do something.