Wal Mart

Residents, the Board of Supervisors and representatives from Wal-Mart gathered again Wednesday night to try to settle traffic issues in the area where the company wants to build a store. But instead of holding the meeting, township officials - against the wishes of Wal-Mart's lawyer - voted to postpone it for another few weeks. The supervisors are awaiting a decision from the state Department of Transportation about which traffic plan for the intersection of Route 1 and Schoolhouse Road is most appropriate.

With fewer Americans covered by health care at their workplace, the legions of Wal-Mart workers in their blue, "How May I Help You?" vests are on the cutting edge of an unsettling trend. Generous employer-based health insurance is fading, if not failing. Health-care experts have declared the system broken. But not enough state or federal policymakers have championed a plausible replacement. And what would an alternative to workplace health insurance look like? Answer: a government system that ensures (not provides, necessarily, just ensures)

Two years after the bickering began over plans that infuriated some Philadelphians and delighted others, the shopping is about to begin. Wal-Mart, the giant discount mass merchandiser, opens its first store in Philadelphia next week. When the doors of the 140,000-square-foot store open Wednesday, some shoppers will be ushered into the store of their dreams: Cheap clothing, accessories, housewares, appliances, health and beauty aids, a pharmacy, optician, photo lab and garden center - all under one roof.

WAL-MART is now the largest private employer in Pennsylvania. Bigger than Penn, Giant Food Stores, US Airways and UPS. That's bad news for American small businesses and local communities. Not because of Wal-Mart's introductory $7- to $8-an-hour wages, or lack of health benefits. And not because of a lack of overtime pay, nor any of the other so-called workers' rights issues that are usually raised by the naysayers to discredit the success of Sam Walton's baby. But because Wal-Mart is single-handedly ending the legacy of guys like Joe Kenney, Carter Gardy, Scott Tutt, the Weisbard family and Al Bouc.

In late August, Charles Palmer ate cantaloupe bought at a Wal-Mart store in Colorado. Two weeks later, he began feeling sick, then became unresponsive and was rushed to a hospital where doctors diagnosed a listeria infection. Now the 71-year-old retired Marine isn't just suing Granada, Colo.-based Jensen Farms, which grew the tainted cantaloupe that he says sickened him. He's also suing Wal-Mart for selling the fruit. Fallout from the outbreak that has killed 29 Americans is broadening to other major retailers that sold the tainted produce and is spurring a national debate on the role groceries and stores should play in making the food-supply chain safe.

It is a quiet Friday afternoon at Gregory's discount department store in Burlington City, and George and Beatrice Dreher are talking about why they've been shopping at the place for 40 years. The prices are low, the people are friendly and the selection is so good, "if I can't find nothing, I come here," said Beatrice, 69. "It's like an old-time general store," said George, also 69. In an industry dominated by nationwide chains, Gregory's stands out as a lonely exception to the rule.

The insecure joined the unemployed yesterday in a vacant storefront in a Woodbury strip mall. There, Wal-Mart had opened a temporary hiring center to recruit 550 cashiers, stock clerks, and supervisors for its new combination store and supermarket opening this summer in Deptford. Among those at the center was a gentleman in his late 50s who did not want his name used. "That would be embarrassing," he said. People might wonder why someone like him, a fixture in the local real estate market, would be looking for work at Wal-Mart.

THE ONLY thing that could've awakened me from a tryptophan-induced slumber last weekend was what happened after the doors opened at a Wal-Mart on Long Island, N.Y. And I don't mean the trampling of Jdimytai Damour. I refer to the subsequent coverage of Damour's tragic death. Everywhere I turned, I kept hearing it was a sign of the foundering economy. Take, for example, the New York Times account. The lead: "In a sign of consumer desperation amid a bleak economy, the annual rite of retailing known as Black Friday turned chaotic and even deadly, as predawn shoppers scrambled for holiday bargains.

The positions recently taken by Wal-Mart in its merchandising of popular music underscores an obvious notion: the dilemma of a capitalistic agent with the ability to make decisions with wide-reaching implications for the general public. Music and art are realms of concentrated and defined human expression - expression that, regardless of its appeal to an individual, or lack of it, garners some sense of recognition on some scale. Such is and shall always be the case with the arts, for they are steeped in the most subjective element in human experience.

The caller had an Eastern European accent, offering "great vorkers" for cleaning Wal-Mart stores and promising "no problems getting into country. " "Put half-dozen in store, I house them, they work 15 hours a day, six months later they go home, no problem," the caller told an East Coast janitorial firm, a major contractor in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and other states. The caller, who was rebuffed and reported to federal authorities, offered a glimpse into the kind of illegal employment practices for which Wal-Mart is being investigated.