A member of the our congregation forwarded a photograph his daughter took in her local WalMart. In the background of the photo you can see a nice ham, and in the foreground there’s a sign that reads:
Delicious for Chanukah
Boneless Smoked Ham
$6.29/lb
Oy gevalt.
There is such a thing as Kosher Bacon you know.http://jewishbacon.wordpress.com/
That picture has been circulating a lot. Wal-Mart has a lot of failures, but this isn’t one of them:
http://www.snopes.com/photos/signs/hanukkah.asp
It’s a mistake, but originating in New York, at Balducci’s.
This one has been making the rounds since December 2007, when a stock clerk in a Greenwich Village gourmet grocery store made this embarrassing mistake. It actually happened back then, but the photos have been repeatedly recycled and usually Walmart gets fingered as the culprit. More here:
http://www.snopes.com/photos/signs/hanukkah.asp
Congratulations to all the mythbusters out there. The key to unraveling this puzzle was the variation on the “friend of a friend” motif which is so characteristic of urban myths.
I have extensive first-hand experience with Wal-Mart culture. This is the sort of mistake they work hard not to make. Wal-Mart is a very advanced multicultural phenomenon. Equally, the systematic discrimination practiced against women in the workforce isn’t a mistake, either. The common denominator? Both practices are Good For Business.
Shorter me: Diversity is profitable; equality is not.
Out here in the Midwest, when I need a lightbulb for my car, cat litter, milk, a pair of socks, ibuprofen, and maybe a new pen, and I need those things at, say, 9 p.m. … because I’ve lost track of time, because I work late, because I just didn’t plan ahead …well, it’s off to WalMart I go.
Because: I live in a town of 1700 people and everything but GasAmerica and Dave’s Pizza closes at 8 p.m. And the closest store that has what I so desperately “need” is 15 miles away. And it will be open all day every day. And it’s WalMart. And I am glad it is there.
And I am sad that the grocery store and the hardware store and the pharmacy in my little town do not stay open late, that they are not open every day, that they keep hours as though this were still the 1950s and moms stayed home and dads worked and all the shopping that needed to be done got done during daylight hours on weekdays. I wish they would change their ways, but they don’t. I wish I had a schedule that fit with theirs, but I don’t, not always, not often enough. And so I am in the habit of shopping at WalMart.