U just got nickeled

But if it's hard to think "out of the box," it may be almost impossible to think out of the
pg.99

Big Box. Wal-Mart, when you're in it, is total - a closed system, a world unto itself. I get
a chill when I'm watching TV in the break room one afternoon and see ... a commercial
for Wal-Mart. When a Wal-Mart shows up within a television within a Wal-Mart, you
have to question the existence of an outer world. Sure, you can drive for five minutes and
get somewhere else-to Kmart, that is, or Home Depot, or Target, or Burger King, or
Wendy's, or KFC. Wherever you look, there is no alternative to the megascale corporate
order, from which every form of local creativity and initiative has been abolished by
distant home offices. Even the woods and the meadows have been stripped of disorderly
life forms and forced into a uniform made of concrete. What you see-highways, parking
lots, stores-is all there is, or all that's left to us here in the reign of globalized, totalized,
paved-over, corporatized everything. I like to read the labels to find out where the
clothing we sell is made-Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri
Lanka, Brazil-but the labels serve only to remind me that none of these places is "exotic"
anymore, that they've all been eaten by the great blind profit-making global machine.
The only thing to do is ask: Why do you - why do we - work here? Why do you stay? So
when Isabelle praises my work a second time (!), I take the opportunity to say I really
appreciate her encouragement, but I can't afford to live on $7 an hour, and how does she
do it? The answer is that she lives with her grown daughter, who also works, plus the fact
that she's worked here two years, during which her pay has shot up to $7.75 an hour. She
counsels patience: it could happen to me. Melissa, who has the advantage of a working
husband, says, "Well, it's a job." Yes, she made twice as much when she was a waitress
but that place closed down and at her age she's never going to be hired at a high-tip place.
I recognize the inertia, the unwillingness to start up with the apps and the interviews and
the drug tests again. She thinks she should give it a year. A year? I tell her I'm wondering
whether I should give it another week.