I continue to delight you with convoluted linguistic constructs and literary devices. In the title, lest you think ill of me, it's not a grammatical error at all, but rather an anacoluthon. Since out of everyone reading these lines only phoneme, and maybe ears_of_tin, actually knows what this word means, once again there's no one to call my bluff. [rubs hands together gleefully].
Amidst all our tourist perturbations we found the time to visit a Woodman's supermarket, where my sister once worked as a cashier. Since then she has become an accountant in the service of a benevolent megacorporation that saves people from terrible diseases. Yes, such things happen. If you don't believe me, you're absolutely right — save people it does, but only those who have insurance. Which about a quarter of the US population lacks. In general, Americans tend to consider their healthcare system the worst in the world, because of all this crap with insurance and terrifying prices. But in my opinion, every nation thinks that way, even those who have free and decent healthcare, like the Canadians or the British.
Logo with an apple
Woodman's, understandably, was founded in 1918 by a butcher named Willard Woodman, which translates as Willard the Carpenter. It must have been fun for him to introduce himself to people — Willard the Carpenter, butcher — talk about confusing. His sons expanded the business to 12 stores in Wisconsin and northern Illinois. By the way, I keep forgetting to mention — geek joy, the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is a senator from none other than the state of Illinois. Alright, got that out of the way, now I can continue with a clear conscience. And there is plenty to continue about.
Although it might seem strange to you after all the savage snarls of capitalism we've observed, Woodman's is a rare example of a non-evil corporation, but rather, on the contrary, a normal company that genuinely tries to build its business in a civilized and decent way. Of course, one shouldn't idealize Woodman's, but nevertheless.
First of all, note what stands in place of a slogan under the logo. The inscription "Employee owned" means that the company is owned by its employees. That is, in 1990 the heirs of Willard Woodman sold the company's shares to their own employees, which isn't such a rare phenomenon. In tech startups, that is, young companies that need to attract the best young employees, bubbling with ideas and burning with enthusiasm, this is practiced everywhere. And it's not just programmers and designers who get lucky. For instance, the YouTube secretary, at the time the latter was sold to Google for 1.6 billion dollars, owned something like one percent of the shares, and thus received practically 16 million dollars. It's good to be a secretary, you just have to know where. Same at Woodman's, even new employees can be issued some number of shares, even if the amount is totally laughable. On the other hand, at the megacorporation where my sister now works, they also issue shares, so that's not necessarily an indicator of benevolence yet.
Secondly, Woodman's pays its workers significantly above the minimum wage and provides them, unlike Walmart, with the notorious insurance, without which you might not even be given first aid, even though they are obliged to.
Thirdly, the company doesn't run expensive advertising campaigns. Prices are low thanks to word of mouth and the "warehouse store" concept of large square footage and massive purchase volumes. Unfortunately, there is a downside to this — the goods sold in the store are the ones the supplier agreed to sell cheaper, not the ones the customer is used to. Items can disappear and reappear at different times as suppliers change, depending on who finds it profitable to work with different retail chains under varying market conditions. Quality can vary along with this.
Usually the quality of products at Woodman's is not bad. All the fruits and vegetables are very large by our standards — outright mutants. Naturally, Latvian housewives and sympathizers will immediately start screaming about "awful chemicals". They're partly right: where these vegetables are grown, they clearly use scientific management, mountains of fertilizers, and pesticides. It's quite possible that part of what's sold consists of genetically modified foods, which are quite common in America, unlike Europe, where they are often outright banned. On the other hand, alongside high demand, this is one of the major reasons why everything in the US is so cheap.
What else informative can be told about Woodman's?
For example, this. At Walmart, the cashier bags your groceries, thanks to a turnstile-like carousel that the bags are hung on. At Woodman's, a dedicated person bags them. This is because it's cheaper to place such a person than to open new registers due to the lines that form when customers are daydreaming instead of speed-packing their stuff into bags. The latter, by the way, come in two varieties — standard plastic and eco-friendly paper, but for some reason without handles. Back home those come with handles, so it's quite strange. Then again, for Americans who roll the bags to the parking lot in a cart and then transfer them into the trunk, handles are useless. Both types of bags are given out for free, which is totally justified given the huge volumes of purchases. My sister, when she worked as a cashier, once saw ten carts belonging to one person, and rang up a receipt for over a thousand dollars. Not a bad grocery haul, huh?
For quick purchases, there are self-checkout lanes where you scan items yourself and pay with a debit card. What's more, you sign on an electronic pad! And back when I was doing the Daugavpils marathon, people told me that signatures would never die out because there's nothing to replace them with. Naive people — here we already have electronic signatures, and in an ordinary supermarket to boot; biometric identification and digital signatures aren't far off. Attentive readers won't pay attention to this lyrical digression, but will ask if I used the word "debit" by accident. No, not by accident.
The thing is, as part of saving your own money, Woodman's didn't accept payment cards at all until 2004, and since 2004 began accepting only debit cards, since the fees aren't so extortionate there. If you're not aware, payment system megacorporations are some of the worst in the world. They take money from everyone — from sellers and from buyers in the form of card fees. Furthermore, these megacorporations are jointly owned by megabanks. Of course they wouldn't tolerate extortion from third parties when they can get into this profitable business themselves. It's roughly like in the movie There Will Be Blood, where the oilman asks his megacompetitors when they will lower the railroad transport rates. To which they answer that it's not their doing, but the railroad companies'. The main character replies in a stern and contemptuous tone that these very competitors own the railroad company, to which the latter have nothing to say in response. So capitalism has always been structured the same way, nothing has changed despite the information age.