Woman kills 3 shoppers to get last Xbox at Chicago Walmart! – Umm…not quite. When this little story first hit my in-box, I laughed. It was clearly supposed to be satire but it turns out that other media outlets do not have my finely tuned sense of humor. Not only was this story not true but I have seen no reported deaths at any Black Friday event this year. (If you’ve heard differently, let me know in the comments with a link.) In fact, every one of my friends that went to BF at Walmart said it was no big deal and they got in and out easily with every thing they wanted. The employees at my Walmart I talked to said everything went well. (One lady told me of a customer that showed up hours after the event asking for one of the guaranteed items and was upset when they were out. She asked her to go “look in the back room”. The associate said it took 10 minutes to convince her that they were all out, had been out for hours, and if there were any left, the associate was going to buy it. I love stories of dumb customers to offset all the stories of dumb associates you guys tell me. 
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The hottest Black Friday seller? A $.29 towel – The author of this story tries to make the case that this cheap towel being so popular is a sign of how bad things are economically in the US. Couldn’t it just be that if you see a $.29 towel, you’d be a fool to pass it up? Don’t we all need more towels? Has no one read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy? A towel is the most important thing you could possibly have!
Jon Stewart doesn’t understand websites – Let me preface this by saying I’m a huge Stewart/Colbert fan. I’m a very conservative guy so I enjoy his take on things but disagree with him a lot. On last night’s episode (12/2/13) he showed a clip of someone saying that hey should let the private sector take care of the healthcare website, then he brought out the fact that Walmart’s website crashed on Black Friday as an example of how the private sector doesn’t always get it right. I just want to point out that the Walmart site was only down for a few hours and was slow for most of the day. The healthcare.gov site was down for MONTHS and never worked right to begin with and even now it appears that the front end might work fine but it’s impossible to get reliable data out of the back end to the insurance companies! Walmart fixed their problem the same day! That’s why the private sector is better at things like that. You know better, Jon. Of course he also tried to make the case that the Bible forbids Christians from ever charging for rooms in their inn. So I guess no Christian can ever have a business in the Hospitality industry.
Utah couple fined $3,500 for bad web review – This has nothing to do with Walmart but I found it fascinating. The idea that a business can fine me for giving a bad review is absolutely absurd. What good are reviews if you can’t trust that the reviewer is under no coercion to make their review positive?
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