By CLARK KAUFFMAN
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
January 7, 2005
A 65-year-old Wal-Mart greeter has been fired for greeting customers with a computer-generated photograph of himself wearing nothing but a Wal-Mart sack.
Dean Wooten was fired in September from his job as a greeter at the Muscatine Wal-Mart store where he had worked for seven years, state records show. He was accused of greeting customers with a picture of himself in which he appeared to be naked except for the carefully placed sack.
Wooten allegedly told customers that Wal-Mart was cutting back on expenses and that the sack represented the new employee uniform.
After some customers complained, a supervisor told Wooten not to display the picture. Five days later, after more customers complained, Wooten admitted he had brought the picture back to work and had been showing it again to customers. He was fired that day.
Wooten applied for unemployment benefits but was denied by Administrative Law Judge Susan Brightman, who ruled that "a reasonable person would know the act of showing a naked body wearing a Wal-Mart sack would not be good for the employer's business."
Wooten said he thought customers would find the photo amusing. It wasn't intended to be critical of Wal-Mart, he said.
"I didn't have nothing against Wal-Mart," he said. "A friend of mine got the photo of the body off the Internet, and he had a picture of me and he put my head on it. When I first seen it, I pretty near died laughing."
