Another sign the apocalypse is upon us

Just a normal Thursday shopping trip, going to Walmart. I only go to watch the elderly greeters at the door. I think I need to learn how that job is done in case it comes to applying for work there. I watched a guy for a while. I can do that. As a matter of fact as the saying goes, I could phone it in. Writing a letter to the Mart right now applying. I plan to sit at home, say hello every 10 minutes, scowl a lot and they can send me a check every couple of weeks. That might be a personal apocalypse but not the one at hand.

Once I tired of watching this guy, I headed through the aisles filling the basket with stuff from my list, like normal. Incidentally I had to buy my fourth 40-pound bag of bird seed this winter. I came to the end of one aisle and something new caught my eye. It was a package about the size of a carton of Campbell soups and shrink-wrapped. But something about the different colors intrigued me and I looked closer. It was an emergency survival kit. According to the label it held 40 complete meals and didn't have a shelf life, it had a half life. I moved around the corner and there was a whole display from floor to the top of the shelving. Number 10 cans of all kinds of dried foods, vegetables, mashed potatoes, even some kind of chocolate powder "with all the advantages of whole milk."

Living as we do in earthquake country, of course most Alaskans are at least aware of the need to squirrel away some supplies in case of isolation. I live between two rivers and the only way out would be over bridges which could be destroyed in a quake so I do have some supplies that would help me hold out for a week or two.

Anyway, as I stood there looking at Walmart's survivalist display I started laughing. Got to thinking about the company foreseeing that apocalypse. It's difficult to picture an executive sitting in Arkansas somewhere worrying about Alaskans and their earthquakes. Unless it was marketing thinking up more crap they can sell us. There might have been a surplus somewhere they had to get rid of. "I know guys, let's freeze dry it and sell it to survivalists."

That isn't so far from truth. Studs Terkel wrote a great book about World War II called "The Good War." In it he interviewed more than 300 people who did various things during the war, from fighters on both sides, to Polish slave laborers in a Nazi factory, to supplying groceries. Each is related in a three to five page chapter. One of those people was a wholesale grocer in California, who thought GI's who were getting freeze-dried foods at the front would come home liking freeze-dried food. Among other things he bought the whole California carrot crop one year late in the war and freeze dried it. Of course when the troops came home they detested freeze-dried food, wouldn't touch it. So, what did the guy do with warehouses full of freeze-dried carrots? He invented carrot cake. People, that is why we have carrot cake today.

So, not too outrageous a thought that Walmert freeze dried some overstocked food and now is selling it as survival emergency supply.

Or, and I like this better, maybe somewhere in the upper reaches of Walmart management there's a guy with not much to do who just discovered that Mayan calendar calling for the end of the world in 2012.

Walmart is getting ready. That should be of some concern to all of us. But remember the survival gear Walmart sells was probably assembled by child laborers in Southeast Asia or China.