Elton John's Walmart

Christians can’t decide whether to love or hate Walmart this season. On the bright side, Walmart has decided to emphasize Christmas. “Happy Holidays” is out, “Merry Christmas” is in. In fact, the joy-filled “Merry Christmas” is so strenuously endorsed that our local Walmart had Christmas goods out on the shelves before the Halloween candies had been put on clearance.

If turning the whole of the fall season into an extended Advent season is good, then Walmart is clearly going above and beyond the call.

On the other hand, Walmart is also clearly courting the gay lifestyle. It has become a partner of the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, thereby joining nearly every one of the Fortune 500.

So, support for a lifestyle that results in the early, painful, diseased death of the consumer is nearly unanimous. Like addiction to tobacco, addiction to the homosexual lifestyle creates a consumer, but what a consumer! Instead of spending money only on tobacco products, they spend money on any epicurean delight. Best of all, while tobacco users often had dependents, homosexuals don’t. They have at least as much disposable income as their heterosexual peers, but they have no one to spend it on but themselves.

This is important when combined with another piece of news: the number of married adults with children living in the same household now make up a minority of the households in the United States.

Businesses go where the money is. As the number of families with children drops, the marketing and culture devoted to families with children will also necessarily drop. It is not cost-effective.

Every market specialist knows that twenty percent of the customer base brings in eighty percent of the business. Indeed, businesses that succeed recognize that they cannot aim to please every customer, rather, they must primarily aim to please the biggest spenders in their stores. The infrequent or penurious customer is not worth the money it costs to retain him.

Just as large companies often spin off and sell subsidiaries that are not generating enough profit, so those same large companies will ignore a customer segment that does not generate enough profit.

Customers can boycott stores, but stores can - by the way they market - also boycott customers. For many companies, married heterosexual adults with children are beginning to be a market segment that is simply not worth the trouble.

Indeed, it is in the interest of most companies to see these same families break up. It is easier to sell Happy Meals to overworked, single parents who don’t have time to cook than it is to sell those same Happy Meals to a stable, married couple with children, especially if one is a stay-at-home parent.

Walmart makes less and less money each year from families precisely because there are fewer and fewer families. So, as Walmart tries to transition to the big spenders, it holds one foot in the doorway of its traditional base. It starts to groom homosexuals while it throws a bone to the families. This is Walmart's gift to us: Merry Christmas.

"From my point of view I would ban religion completely, even though there are some wonderful things about it. I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate."

So says Elton John (whose statements above show he also keeps a foot in both doors, and in more ways than one), and who can argue? Compassion, as it is currently defined, means celebrating diversity while making sure all the diverse wallets empty into your own. Sure, the average homosexual may die an early, diseased, painful death, but he bought quite a few of the self-indulgent accoutrements for his death-style at our stores. There's compassion for you.

Walmart isn't the first to do this, it is among the last. It is caught between catering to a dying lifestyle (the family) and catering to the lifestyle of the dying (homosexuals). All the signs indicate the profit margin on the second is better, thus it would be immoral to harm shareholders by concentrating on the first. So, in true Calvinist Christian style, it pursues the largest profit margin as the most moral course. That's as close to Christian compassion as any corporation can expect to get.