Retail Shadows: A Dividend’s Murky Reflection

Walmart, ah, Walmart! It flourishes, of course. A veritable hydra, sprouting new stores with the implacable force of habit. Its recent earnings, reported with the solemnity usually reserved for pronouncements of plague, were…adequate. A five-and-a-half percent increase, they say. As if a five-and-a-half percent increase in the acquisition of ceramic gnomes and discounted socks constitutes a triumph of the human spirit. And e-commerce, surging a full twenty-four percent! One imagines legions of digital clerks, toiling in the server farms, each transaction a tiny, insignificant step towards…what, precisely? A world overflowing with plastic trinkets?







