Walmart Hiring DJ In Response To Employee Complaints About Too Much Celine Dion And Justin Bieber
If you’ve ever wandered through a Walmart and thought, “Wow, they’re really kicking out the jams today,” you have either never actually been to a Walmart or have some sort of unchecked brain trauma that you should immediately get examined. They tend to play a lot of Céline Dion and Justin Bieber — entirely too much Céline Dion and Justin Bieber, according to Walmart employees. The retail giant has caught a lot of flak over the years for their treatment of their employees, but I guess some lines can’t be crossed, even by amoral corporate overlords. On Wednesday, thousands of Walmart workers convened for the company’s annual shareholders meeting, and executives detailed a number of policy changes intended to boost employee morale (read: make working at Walmart less of a living hell). According to the Washington Post:
The one that seemed to draw the most whoops from the crowd was a pledge to ditch a CD that has apparently been on loop in the stores for months and begun to drive employees crazy. The CD was a punch line multiple times in executives’ presentation to workers, including when a puppet character named Willie joked that being a Walmart store worker was getting dangerous. When Mike Moore, executive vice president of supercenters, asked why, Willie replied, “One of my fellow associates recently developed a serious eye-tic from hearing Céline Dion’s greatest hits on loop in our stores.” Justin Bieber was also name-checked as one of the singers featured on the notorious CD.
First of all … what? Okay, apparently the Walmart shareholders meeting includes puppet characters and is way more insane than I had imagined. But, more importantly, the end result is that the infamous CD is being scrapped, and “Walmart stores and distribution centers will soon have a new soundtrack that they’re calling Walmart Radio, in which a DJ will spin tunes to be pumped through the stores.”
So now, every time you go to Walmart, you can think of it like going to watch a DJ set. And every time that you hear terrible music being played, it will be an actual human being’s fault.