It's a rare person who has any business criticizing anyone for shopping at Walmart

[sofa king]

165. Lemme tell you about my Wal Mart.

After almost completely cornering the hunting and fishing markets for fifty miles around, my Wal Mart discovered that they could eliminate the position of their one sporting goods guy and simply tell thousands of hunters that their "system is down," and that they cannot issue hunting licenses anymore.

(They learned this trick in the aftermath of the derecho that rolled through this summer, when nobody at Wal Mart could figure out that their computer had to be restarted--for six weeks.)

So those hunters are still buying all their hunting goods at Wal Mart, because they're already there and it's cheaper, and then descending upon the handful of actual outdoor shops that remain and wasting hours of their time every day completing their no-profit, time-wasting regulatory requirements. Many of them don't get that far, give up, go hunting anyway, and are getting busted.

Even after killing off almost all of their competition, Wal Mart has still found a way to shift the regulatory burden onto their competitors, and the penalties onto the individuals.

I really dislike Wal Mart these days. I wish the hunters advocacy groups would roll in and smack 'em, but they're not actual hunter advocacy groups, just front organizations for the GOP, who does not give a damn about actual hunters.

Just one more way The Man screws over their most loyal constituents. To a certain extent, the hunters deserve it, because it was of course they who created this state of affairs and they who repeatedly voted to make it inexorable and permanent. But it is still harmful, still damaging to society, and still highly profitable for the evil entity that created the state of affairs in the first place.

Many of those people hunt because it's the only meat they're going to eat this winter. When they get hungry enough, they're going to come out of the forest, with their rifles.