And I must be PMSing...
Because a story I read in Fortune Magazine almost made me cry.
Excerpts from "The Only Lifeline Was Walmart,"
Fortune Magazine, Vol 152, No. 7, October 3, 2005, p. 74
"Jessica Lewis couldn't believe her eyes. Her entire community - Waveland, Miss., a Gulf Coast resort town of 7,000 - had been laid waste by the storm, and Lewis, co-manager of the local Wal-Mart, was asessing the damage to her store. Trudging through nearly two feet of water in the fading light, Lewis thought, How are we ever going to clean up this mess?
That quickly became the least of Lewis's worries. As the sun set on Waveland, a nightmarish scene unfolded on Highway 90. She saw neighbors wandering around with bloody feet because they had fled their homes with no shoes. 'It broke my heart to see them like this,' Lewis recalls. 'These were my kid's teachers. Some of them were my teachers. They were my neighbors. They were my customers.'
Lewis felt there was only one thing to do. She had her stepbrother clear a path through the mess in the store with a bulldozer. Then she salvagged everything she could and handed it out in the parking lot. She gave socks and underwear to shivering Waveland police officers who had climbed into trees to escape the rising water. She handed out shoes to her barefoot neighbors and diapers for their baibies. She gave people bottled water to drink and sausages, stored high in the warehouse, that hadn't been touched by the flood. She even broke into the pharmacy and got insulin and drugs for the AIDS patients.
'This is the right thing to do,' she recalls thinking. 'I hope by bosses aren't going to have a problem with that.'
Wal-Mart, America's biggest company, is many things to many people - discounter extraordinaire, union buster, guardian of small town virtues, wrecker of small town shops - but about one thing there is no question: It is the repository of the nation's stuff. And for the people whose lives were stripped bare by Katrina, it was mundane stuff that meant the difference between life and death. Lewis was one of thousands of Wal-Mart employees who delivered, and no, her bosses don't have a problem with what she did."
Excerpts from "The Only Lifeline Was Walmart,"
Fortune Magazine, Vol 152, No. 7, October 3, 2005, p. 74
"Jessica Lewis couldn't believe her eyes. Her entire community - Waveland, Miss., a Gulf Coast resort town of 7,000 - had been laid waste by the storm, and Lewis, co-manager of the local Wal-Mart, was asessing the damage to her store. Trudging through nearly two feet of water in the fading light, Lewis thought, How are we ever going to clean up this mess?
That quickly became the least of Lewis's worries. As the sun set on Waveland, a nightmarish scene unfolded on Highway 90. She saw neighbors wandering around with bloody feet because they had fled their homes with no shoes. 'It broke my heart to see them like this,' Lewis recalls. 'These were my kid's teachers. Some of them were my teachers. They were my neighbors. They were my customers.'
Lewis felt there was only one thing to do. She had her stepbrother clear a path through the mess in the store with a bulldozer. Then she salvagged everything she could and handed it out in the parking lot. She gave socks and underwear to shivering Waveland police officers who had climbed into trees to escape the rising water. She handed out shoes to her barefoot neighbors and diapers for their baibies. She gave people bottled water to drink and sausages, stored high in the warehouse, that hadn't been touched by the flood. She even broke into the pharmacy and got insulin and drugs for the AIDS patients.
'This is the right thing to do,' she recalls thinking. 'I hope by bosses aren't going to have a problem with that.'
Wal-Mart, America's biggest company, is many things to many people - discounter extraordinaire, union buster, guardian of small town virtues, wrecker of small town shops - but about one thing there is no question: It is the repository of the nation's stuff. And for the people whose lives were stripped bare by Katrina, it was mundane stuff that meant the difference between life and death. Lewis was one of thousands of Wal-Mart employees who delivered, and no, her bosses don't have a problem with what she did."
posted by littledevilworks at 1:56 PM
1 Comments:
Between this story, my experiences with Starbucks, and Arbys cutting me slack when I pour fruit punch in my water cup, I'm starting to wonder what's changing in the corporate world.
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