When you walk into a big-box store like Walmart, nothing is the way it is on accident. Every minute detail from product placement, to the temperature, to the lighting is master planned to trap you and make you spend the most money possible. While these tactics may work on customers, the employees of these stores are subject to the same florescent lighting, 60-degree temperatures, and dulcet, aggressively agreeable music repeated for eight hours at a time, every single day.
This week, the Washington Post reported that things were so bad at Walmart, workers erupted in cheers when executives mercifully announced at a shareholders meeting that they would hire a DJ to replace the doldrums of the same CD looped over and over again.
“The one that seemed to draw the most whoops from the crowd was a pledge to ditch a CD that has apparently been on loop in the stores for months and begun to drive employees crazy. The CD was a punch line multiple times in executives’ presentation to workers, including when a puppet character named Willie joked that being a Wal-Mart store worker was getting dangerous. When Mike Moore, executive vice president of supercenters, asked why, Willie replied, ‘One of my fellow associates recently developed a serious eye-tic from hearing Celine Dion’s greatest hits on loop in our stores.’ Justin Bieber was also name-checked as one of the singers featured on the notorious CD.”
The store says it plans to start a brand-new radio station exclusively for the store to break up the monotony, but before they hire anyone to run it, we have a polite suggestion. This sounds like it’s the perfect job for DJ Hennessy Youngman, the architect and godfather of CVS Bangers. He’s already proven that he can run things on the pharmacy level, let him bring his airhorns and gunshots over Steve Winwood tracks to the big boys. The time is now! Everyone in Walmart will be asking, “Damn, where’d ya find this?!”
(via Washington Post)
