Hot Links and Pogo

by Gary Phillips

For the love of God, Sam’s Club is farming out those jobs where usually little old ladies wearing those see-through plastic gloves, retirees and pensioners, stand behind a table with a crock pot or one of those goofy electric skillets on it handing you a piece of smoked sausage or cheese cube on a toothpick for you to sample and be enticed to buy a crate of the stuff. Sam’s Club, owned by Wal-Mart, is getting rid of more than 11,000 jobs nationwide, mostly in what’s called its product demonstration department. This particular aspect of your mega store sojourn will be taken over by an entity called Shopper Events of Rogers, Arkansas. The laid off workers will get the wonderful opportunity to reapply for their jobs with this outfit. The layoffs affect about 9% of Sam Club’s overall workforce, with an average of 20, mostly part-time workers per store doing the product samples bit.

The Sam’s Club division, which, unheard of till now, closed ten stores earlier this month, has underperformed and the outsourcing is seen as the catchall cost cutting measure. One guy who was laid off was making a whopping $14 an hour after being on the Sam’s Club payroll for 17 years ... 17 years. Now he gets to compete, at a lower wage of course, with younger unemployed folks for a job he’d been doing. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Shopper Events charge Sam’s Club $200 per day per demo, as they call them. Under the aegis of Bright Ideas, Shopper Events, which already handles the demos for the Wal-Mart stores, hands out 2.8 million samples a week along with diet and cooking tips.

What the hell does it say about the state of the U.S. economy that a company like Shopper Events fills a business niche? How fucked up is it that there’s money to be made by undercutting a crappy job of handing out tiny plates of turkey lasagna to shoppers and having to clean up plops of food when some harried mom’s kid dumps their sample on the floor? Or maybe chucks it back at you. Also, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers union, the laid off employees had to sign an agreement they wouldn’t sue for age discrimination so as to get their severance packages.

In the first RoboCop movie from the eighties, written by Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner, a near future Detroit (a 1991 Motor City in fact) teeters on the brink—kind of like it does now in reality. The crime-plagued city brings in Omni Consumer Products, who apparently offer everything from multi-grain breakfast cereals to killer droids. OCP takes over the police force while another component of this world-spanning corporation will tear down funky Detroit and redevelop it as Delta City—though Motown sits on an eponymously named river that leads to Lake St. Clair; no deltas, but it must have sounded better than Lake City, one supposes.

OCP also has on tap a police cyborg program they’re able to bring online when an intrepid cop named Alex J. Murphy is “swiss-cheesed’ in a shooting and left for dead by some ruffians. He’s subsequently resurrected as the title character, an Iron Man-like augmented alloy stud who has hyper senses and strength, though has lost his humanity in the process. The cops go on strike at being privatized and Murphy the RoboCop uncovers the scheme that one of OCP’s VPs has had a particularly vicious gang of thugs (headed by Kurtwood Smith who would go on to play the put-upon dad, Red, in That 70s Show sitcom) in his employ. The same dudes who shoot the shit out of him. The scheming VP, played by another TV dad, Ronny Cox (Apple’s Way), uses the hoodlums to do his dirty work and strategic criminal activity to in turn justify bigger expenditures by OCP. Like its killer mechanical beast the ED-209 that RoboCop has a showdown with in the end.

The subtext of RoboCop was a warning that outsourcing to corporations requires diligent oversight as said corp has a broader agenda than just the single company or public formation it contracts with for service. There are, as some philosopher has said, wheels within wheels.

For if you click on Shopper Events’ website it states: “The Strategic partnership between Shopper Events and Wal-Mart was created to improve the in-store experience for the Wal-Mart shopper – and to create better interaction and relationship with your brand.” Does that mean Shopper Evnets only services Wal-Mart and not the competition? Are there interlocking boards? Looking on a map, Rogers is not too far from Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters of Wal-Mart. Less than ten miles it appears. Don’t know what that means, just speculating.

Jeremy Scahill, who’d written a bestselling book about the private security contractor in Iraq, Blackwater (now called We, Xe or some such), has warned the company has branched out and has gotten into the intelligence gathering services for hire to Fortune 500 companies.

“Blackwater started a private intelligence company,” quoted on infowars.com, explained, “a private CIA essentially, called Total Intelligence Solutions. And the man running Total Intelligence Solutions is J. Cofer Black. He’s a thirty-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency. He also was the guy who ran the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, the government-sanctioned kidnap-and-torture program.”

Economy in the tank, the dems running around like chickens with their heads cut of, the prez needing to talk and walk tough and swing a big stick, teabaggers feeling their oats, China owning our note ... “We have met the enemy, and we is Detroit 1991,” to badly malign Walt Kelly’s words through his comic strip sage, Pogo the Possum.

What if in an effort to diversify and better its image, Blackwater/XE buys out Shopper Events? You could find yourself waltzing through Sam’s Club one day and some burly chap, or chick, in black and those gloves with the fingers cut off sticks out their hand holding a savory square of grilled meat.

“Have a hot link, motherfuckah,” they say with a smile, their Ingram assault rifle slung casually across their torso.

Pucker up.

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