A point of pride for me is that that Walmart would not hire me. I took all their personality (or rather, lack of personality) tests and apparently failed. I think they thought I would organize a union or something...

It was awful.

What's equally awful is in my college career, I worked at Goody's Family Clothing, where they did the exact same cheer, but with the G-O-O-D-Y-'-S, and yes, they called the apostrophe in Goody's a squiggly, too.

I could never bring myself to squiggle.

call: Who's number one?

response: The customer! Always! Hooooh!

Sorry to have to remind you of that.

I would rather read 1,000 of these than one more post by Charles Mudede.

When did you live in the Springs? I spent a lot of my youth there.

Then again, I never worked at a Wal squiggly Mart, thank dog.

Also, 11 FTW!

Fry's Electronics does the same "CHEER" every morning...they say apostrophe.

...

didn't think so.

Despite the indignity, they all seem so happy. Probably because they're rich. Tell that to your Mister Charles "Capitalism is All in Your Mind" Mudede.

Search my bag, pat my ass, make me wear a horrifically uncomfortable uniform ... but for the love of God, don't make me do the fucking squiggley.

The only satisfying part of working there was honing my thieving skills. ♦♦

If I can say something nice, at least they didn't offer the world another corporate, compound pronoun, ala "WalMart". It's a prolific enough abuse of English as it is, but had Walmart done it, it would have become unstoppably pervasive on every level - and not just in the technology sector where it's mostly contained to now.

IT'S NOT A SQUIGGLY
IT'S A HYPHEN

Because some folks (not all that many, but some) where I live shop at "Wal-Markt's" and "K-mark's."

It's essentially unAmerican to ask folks to... well, do most anything. Remember those simple, group calisthenics that we were informed in the 80's that Japanese factory workers do? Er, maybe we should have done that.

I had made it halfway through the store, and all of the sudden, a recording of "Amazing Grace", played on a bagpipe, started blaring through the store (it was not long after 911. I don't know if that had anything to do with it, but that was sort of the theme song for that particular event)

If there's one song I hate, it's "Amazing Grace". If there's one instrument I hate, it's the bagpipes. Combine the two, and I'm ready to stick my head in an oven. Thus, I took it as a sign from God that I needed to leave and never come back.

So I did. You don't ignore signs from God.

The suits probably called it "squiggly" because "hyphen" sounds too similar to "hymen" and they figured enough people would substitute the latter to subvert the whole "in solidarity with our corporate values" paradigm the cheer was no doubt meant to foster.

FWIW, I had been given to understand WalMart substituted the star for the hyphen as some sort of "tribute" to Sam Walton upon his death a number of years ago.

And also, having worked for a company that did business with WalMart, I can say they treated their vendors almost as poorly as their employees; when my retail sales manager would return from a trip to Bentonville, he'd always complain about the fact that their national consumer products rep would meet them in a non-descript office off-site from the WM HQ, where the only furniture was a desk, a comfy chair for the rep, and several cheap plastic lawn chairs for everyone else.

And then, the rep would tell them how much they were going to pay for our product, which invariably was only a penny or two over our per unit manufacturing cost. After which they would remind us that, "well, you'll make it back on volume, since we're going to buy 8 gazillion units of your product; that's how we play, take it or leave it."

And you wonder why WalMarts are able to offer those "everyday low, low prices"...

Shockingly, they hired me even though I gave straight-up honest answers on their Free Personality Test(TM). Took about an hour of questioning to "clarify" my answers, though. "Why yes, I support the legalization of marijuana even though I don't use it myself. Why do you ask?"

I can indeed confirm the squiggly, although my store lacked the YMCA-style letters. I believe the squiggly related to an even older logo, where the hyphen was actually a tilde-hyphen instead of a star-hyphen, so I'd be quite surprised if they dropped it from the cheer just because the logo changed again. The squiggly in the cheer is a central part of how they tell themselves that their company isn't the soul-sucking corporate monster it truly is.

"3492, we can drink more than you!" Didn't dare actually say that in front of *most* of the managers, of course... except for the cool ones...