WAL-MART DESTROYS UNSOLD CLOTHING INSTEAD of GIVING it to CHARITIES, and About 100 Other Headlines on Twitter; Alternative Media is Only as Good as Those Relaying the Story

The irony of Wal-Mart is that regardless of how much evil they are associated with, shoppers who love their low prices will come to their defense every time. Plus we all have to go there because quite honestly, nothing remotely similar to Wal-Mart is open after 9 pm in your town. Such is the phenomenon occurring on Twitter right now, with Wal-Mart as a top trending topic because they, along with H&M, have been reported as destroying unsold clothing by The Huffington Post. One thing I love about The Huffington Post is that they are equal opportunity offenders and stop at nothing when it comes to exposing individuals and corporations; if you have skeletons, they will find it.

The irony of Twitter is that half of its populace is bourgeois, cosmopolitan, well-read, well-traveled, and have aesthetic and ideological differences with the rest of the social-networking sphere; Facebook is often criticized for its minutiae, and of course the half of Twitter that are refuges from MySpace, about the only true free dating hookup place left on the Internet has nothing to do with the former. The latter is part of the noise that people on Twitter often complain about, and the half that you initially follow, because they are cute, or said something really cool, but often unfollow because they refuse to just shut the hell up already about themselves. They loudly broadcast to the network about their own selfish gratification, just like the people on Facebook you were trying to get away from.

However having said all of this, one of the funnier trends to play out on Twitter is that of the excess and waste of H&M and Wal-Mart with the way they throw unsold clothing in the trash as opposed to allowing someone else to benefit from it. Now of course restaurants do this type of thing all the time, as do other organizations and corporations, but leave it to Wal-Mart to actually get caught with their hand in the jar. Neither corporation is known for paying workers much or treating them fairly, both get a rep for cheap labor and sweatshops and now this. The irony of this, is that it is not Ralph Lauren, Levi Strauss, or any of the other clothing behemoths that are involved in this. It isn't one of the large clothing firms that you would just assume do this because they want to keep the poor from wearing their stuff for cheap, it is corporations that essentially, make cheap, worthless junk as clothing to begin with that are involved in the waste.

The worst thing that Wal-Mart could have done was to allow someone associated with The Huffington Post to get their hands on such a story. The best thing they could have done was allow this to play out this way, because it looks as though snobbish liberals, who always hated Wal-Mart anyway, and are more interested in spending money at Target and Khols, push this story. You don't hear this coming from middle-America or the Heartland, but snobs on the one of the most contradictory social networks where the rich and poor alike, upper class and lower class, educated freaks of nature, nerdy social misfits and the loudest ghetto voices you will ever "hear" or experience online, coalesce into a melting pot where there is something for everyone. As a result it is the lowest ranking trend, just good enough to be interesting but far underneath the usual fun and games, denoted by a hash tag, that we play on Twitter. Most people are asking why Wal-Mart is a trending topic, with most people telling you exactly why, with most people who didn't know, that now know, show indifference. It is like "Oh, well I can't say that I am surprised"; after all, this is the corporation that will not allow their employees to take cardboard boxes off of the company grounds, so what else would you expect ...