Yes, friends, I admit it.  I am a Wal-Mart Shopper.  And believe me when I say unabashedly that I am a shopper extraordinaire.  I have loved shopping since I bought my first full ounce of chocolate-covered peanuts for 2 cents at Woolworth’s, using my own allowance.  I was five then.  I’m 57 now, and my shopping skills are so honed that I can literally smell a bargain at 100 yards the way a great hunter can sense his prey in a forest.  

My family has even occasionally called me the Great American Shopper.  I shop only one day each week, using a detailed list on a form that I designed myself.  I operate within a budget amount and only use cash.  I never take a credit card with me, because I simply lack the self-discipline to avoid impulse purchases.  And the way I see it, when I go shopping to fulfill the needs of my family, it’s little ole me against the savviest, shrewdest, most high-teched, highly credentialed Shopper Sharks ever to grace this planet - retail/advertising/need-creating gurus.  To me, shopping is a bit like warfare; it’s my wits against theirs.  And I always shop to win.       

I consider it a personal insult to my intelligence as an America whenever and wherever I see overpriced goods and snooty sales clerks, whether in a classy boutique or a restaurant, or just a big, full-price department store.  If a merchant wants to gratuitously give me a lot of ambience, pay designers to perfectly arrange the goods, play my favorite classical music to soothe my weary shopper’s mood or set a pristine white tablecloth under my hamburger, then that’s fine by me, and I’ll always pick his goods.  But when he tries - and does - double, triple and quadruple the markup for all of the niceties, it makes my frugal American blood boil. 

So, when my favorite store starts taking it on the chin from the union bosses, their Democratic Party pols, and the Looney-Left press, it’s high time I make this public confession as a Wal-Mart shopper and defend my store.  When someone picks a fight with Wal-Mart, they’re picking a fight with me!

I shop at Wal-Mart for very simple, down-to-earth reasons:  consistent  product availability, clerks who are there to serve me (the customer) instead of the other way around, the guaranteed-satisfaction policy and the price that simply will not be beaten.  Those are pretty good reasons, don’t you think?              

Sam Walton was a man after my very own heart.  He brought big-buyer price competition from behind the closed doors of uptown boardrooms right into the heart of small-town America.  In effect, he took the power of the merchant’s purse and handed it right over to us consumers, slashing the oversized, per-item profits of retailers and almost single-handedly tearing to shreds the old notion of the “manufacturer’s suggested retail price.”  Young consumers, naturally, do not even remember the days in which it was next to impossible to purchase any item in a competitive marketplace without the ironclad price-fixing of the MSRP.

Sam Walton believed the MSRP was downright un-American, and so do I.  Certainly, I would never be one to begrudge small-town merchants a decent living, nor any other shoppers the right to pay more for the things they consider of utmost importance.  For some, personal service and ambience are things for which they are willing to pay a great deal more.  All power to them; America is big enough for us all.

So, what’s the beef the Democrats have with Wal-Mart?  It’s non-union, folks.  That’s the sum of it.  Socialists always strive to bring everything in society down to the lowest common denominator, squeeze out even the idea of individual tastes and competition between private entities.  It’s the way of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro and all the rest of this ill-begotten lot.  As Churchill so eloquently noted, the one thing that you always get with socialism is fairness, absolutely all sharing equally in “misery.”

I’ve actually spoken at length with a good many of the workers at Wal-Mart and asked them outright:  Do you want a union shop?  Do you feel unfairly treated by Wal-Mart?

“No!” is the unequivocal answer from every single one I’ve asked.

So, I confess that I love Wal-Mart even more than union corporations.  It’s the old-fashioned American way of doing business, which has resulted in a greater degree of shared prosperity than in any civilization in the history of the world.

Take that, all you Democrats following Marx, and shove it.  Wal-Mart is in the spirit of liberty and America.  And if I have a thing to say about it, Wal-Mart is here to stay.