65 year old Walmart greeter fired over pic

[MacDawg]

Walmart greeter fired over handing out his semi-nude pic.
Claims that due to cutbacks its the new uniform!
(Says the photo is his head put on another body)

Link to article on DesMoinesRegister.com

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."

Pretty sick if you ask me!

Woof, Woof - Dawg

 

[tech4all]

Yea I just read that on Netscape. Where did you find that photo?

(Says the photo is his head put on another body)

I dunno, to me it looks pretty real. If so, that is some good Photoshop.

 

[Mr. Anderson]

Quite sad, especially after he had been told not to show the picture and went ahead and did it anyway. Makes you wonder what he was thinking.....

D

 

[MacDawg]

Where did you find that photo?

I got the pic from the greeter at Walmart...

Not really... its on Drudge

Doesn't have quite the same impact without the pic does it?

Woof, Woof - Dawg

 

[Daveway]

Doesn't he look homeless?

 

[jsw]

Doesn't he look homeless?

Actually, he looks soon-to-be-homeless.

I admire his guts, though. I'd use a term other than "guts" but see no evidence of that.

 

[Dr. Dastardly]

Doesn't he look homeless?

Your so silly, everyone knows all Walmart workers are homeless.

 

[emw]

I admire his guts, though.

And his man-boobs are nice too

He was trying to make a point about work standards at WalMart, which I can only imagine are not fantastic. Not the best way, but like you I admire him for sticking to his guns on this.

 

[jsw]

Not the best way, but like you I admire him for sticking to his guns on this.

You have to admire - and thank God for - the structural integrity of the Walmart bag as well.

 

[solvs]

I'm sure someone will pick this up and he'll get another job somewhere else. If nothing else than for pity. Or because that's kinda funny.

Thanks for the nightmares BTW. Ewwww.

 

[dotnina]

Yeah, that's really sick -- Photoshop or not. It might be one thing to show your other 65-year-old buddy, but it's another thing to just hand it out to random Walmart shoppers.

I would have complained too, and I'm not usually much of a complainer.

 

[wdlove]

Very sad, but he should have been smart enough after being warned with the first incident. It really looks like his body to me. Now his laugh has cost him his job.

 

[russianguns]

 

[mymemory]

Yea I just read that on Netscape. Where did you find that photo?



I dunno, to me it looks pretty real. If so, that is some good Photoshop.

It is not Photoshoped, it is real. Just think about it, take a look at the shows behind the pic, they are perfect, no amateur would create those behind the head and there is not blur or any other trick to try to mask any editing, in other word the picture is real or his friend is an incredible state of the art Hollywoo-special effects-retoucher.

 

[yamabushi]

Naked or not?

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."

A person is either naked or not. While his shopping bag outfit is certainly far too revealing for my comfort he is by no means naked. Everyone is naked under their clothes.

 

[takao]

side question: what's the job of a walmart greeter exactly? do they just stand at the entrance and greet customers ? (ask because there is no walmart in austria AFAIK)

 

[yamabushi]

side question: what's the job of a walmart greeter exactly? do they just stand at the entrance and greet customers ? (ask because there is no walmart in austria AFAIK)

Yes they also sometimes give shopping carts and baskets to customers as well as give directions and answer any questions the customers have.

 

[Mord]

we dont have them in the uk even in asda (which is owned by wallmart) they would just annoy me if i went in to do some shopping and i got "greeted" and handed a trolly when i wanted a basket or vice versa.

 

[takao]

thx for the fast replies

it would annoy me perhaps as well

but i guess i found out why they don't bother with austria at the moment: when they joined the german market in 1997 they underestimated the german supermarket-market,competitiors ,unions and laws concerning employment and where you can build your stores
in the stores they bought they simply hired more people and lowered prices completly ignoring the fact that before those stores where already operating at slim margins (average pre tax margin in germany 2% and _below_ compared to the 5% in the US )
1 year later the started firing
and some renting-contracts are already running out for some stores ...

since 1997 they lose multiple hundreds of € every year (up to 750€) i guess they simple don't want to add the additional 10% losses they would get with the austrian market

(they are on their 4th manager since 1997...)

edit:interesting link
http://www.hicbusiness.org/biz2003proceedings/Andreas Knorr.pdf

 

[Les Kern]

Just when I thought it was yet another story about the evil Wal-Mart and it's assault on the middle-class, I was instead directed to a story about an idiot. Please don't do that again.

 

[aricher]

That photo has been floating around the web for months. If you do a Google image search on Wal-Mart this is one of the first images to come up.

 

[EJBasile]

A new fad in homeless person clothing. This new fashion statement will be sold by Koach, Pollo Ralf Loren , Louis Vatton, Aberkrombie and Phitch, and other fake brands sold on the streets of New York City.

 

[OldManJimbo]

This guy is an idiot

I can't think of a corporate entity for which I have more disgust than Wal-Mart. Their do-gooder PR machine is nothing more than an attempt to buy off the approval of a populace too selfish to realize the "low prices" come at the very "high price" of lower wages, curtailed competition and incredible corporate greed.

THEN - along comes this idot and does something SO stupid it makes me agree with a Wal-Mart action - and I HATE when that happens.

 

[rainman::|:|]

1. Living in iowa, i just want to say not all iowans use phrases like "i seen it". Many of us are fully capable with proper english. And, most of us aren't idiots.

2. Iowans who are wal-mart greeters ARE, necessarily, idiots. Mostly they just sit and glare at you (for being too young, and thenceforth presumably a bad person) but sometimes they will do really random things like this (other random things greeters do: chase people with their canes, tell war stores, and be mentally retarded).

3. This is the first time I've seen the picture in question, but I have seen it on the net many times, as was mentioned-- I don't understand this? Did he have it for a while before deciding to start showing it off?

And no, that doesn't look like a fake. And no, he's not really nekkid. Still really weird, i actually don't blame wal-mart here.

 

[MacDawg]

3. This is the first time I've seen the picture in question, but I have seen it on the net many times, as was mentioned-- I don't understand this? Did he have it for a while before deciding to start showing it off?

Actually, the article is from 07JAN, but it says in the article he was fired in September. He did hand it out for a while, was asked to stop, and began handing it out again. Why they wrote the article so late, I don't know. Maybe the firing just got publicized because of a law suit or something. Anyway, that would explain the pic being around for a while. I picked the story up on Drudge and posted it here with the link to the Des Moines Register.

Woof, Woof - Dawg