Nathaniel Hawthorne may be dead, but his spirit still lives on at Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT), specifically in this store in Attalla, Alabama. You can recognize the store because it's the one with the two petty thieves out front, wearing signs around their necks: "I am a thief, I stole from Wal-Mart." The signs, ordered by a local judge (they were worn for eight hours on a couple of Saturdays) have received positive comments from shoppers, according to the store manager; signs that the 1800s are alive and well.As William Faulkner wrote, in the south, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
Surely the mainstream retail climate has moved past expending precious management time and justice department resources on the humiliation of those desperate individuals (or, as one of the punishees claims, victims of misunderstanding) who steal items of miniscule value. Most companies who own stores build losses into their forecasted income statement. But at Wal-Mart, the scarlet letter lives on.
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