Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Star Trek Spoilers and a Mayor With Baggage: Readers Respond

How To Be an Awful House Guest: Musician Edition

By Joseph Hess and Mabel Suen Editor's note: This post is half of a two-parter! Please read its companion post as well, Six Tips For Hosting Dirty Vagrants (Also Known as Touring Bands). Musicians are selfish, entitled bastards. The most insidiously horrible ones tend to take their acts on the ro ... More >>

Henry Rollins: The Column! The Failings of Music Writers

[Look for your weekly fix from the one and only Henry Rollins right here on West Coast Sound every Thursday, and come back tomorrow for the awesomely annotated playlist for his Saturday KCRW broadcast.] A few nights ago, we took the tour bus into the massive parking lot of a Walmart in South Dako ... More >>

Another Cantaloupe Outbreak Kills 2, Sickens 141

In a fatal rerun of the 2011 outbreak, two people have died and 141 have been sickened since July 7 after eating cantaloupes, the Wall Street Journal reports. But unlike last year's Listeria outbreak in cantaloupes, this year's deadly melons contain Salmonella, according to the Centers for Disease C ... More >>

Most Meat Is Full of Antibiotics, Survey Finds

Rep. Louise Slaughter of New York has released the results from a survey of more than 60 fast food, retail, production and grocery companies asking them about their policies on the use of antibiotics in meat and poultry, Forbes reports. The purpose of the survey was to evaluate their level of transp ... More >>

5 Sexiest Waitress Spots in L.A. Challenge Legal Definition of Work Clothes

So Courtney Scaramella didn't want to wear a sexy schoolgirl skirt and now she's in the news, alleging in a lawsuit that the Westwood bar (O'Hara's) where she was waitressing fired her after she objected to the dress policy in writing? Well, Courtney, you might have a case (the bar says she doesn't ... More >>

Top 6 Weekend Food Events: Tracie McMillan, Margarita Dinner, Burrito Babes, Food Swap, Wine Tasting Food Truck Fest

Tracie McMillan at Zócalo Public Square "Is eating well just for the rich?" Journalist Tracie McMillan, author of The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table, will tackle the topic in a conversation with Evan Kleiman of KCRW's Good Food at Zócalo ... More >>

Hypocrisy in Hollywood: The Rich, White Males in the Film Industry Are the Real Pirates

"Pirates of the Caribbean," one of the most pirated movies ever, still raked in billions.​It's no secret -- rich white guys in Hollywood were the No. 1 reason why scary copyright bills SOPA and PIPA almost made it through Washington this year. Yet the film industry is sort of the original pir ... More >>

Occupy LA Plans to 'Occupy ICE' at Downtown Federal Building: Immigrant Crackdowns to be Protested

​Occupy L.A.'s City Hall encampment might be a thing of the past, but the occupiers continue to return to their Civic Center home for "general assembly" meetings and protests. Today, demonstrators warn, the tents will return to the neighborhood, this time in front of the downtown federal buil ... More >>

People Who Pirate Music Are Assholes

On Sunday, Governor Brown signed a bill cracking down on large plants that illegally duplicate CDs and DVDs. While perhaps the only immediate effect of this legislation will be fewer people trying to sell you bootleg copies of The Smurfs at Chipotle, it's a step in the right direction. But the much ... More >>

Food News Roundup: Lots of Pie, 200 Year-old Desserts Teaching Kanye West to Cook

-- Gordon Ramsay teaches Kanye West how to cook. [The Mirror] -- How to make a 200 year-old dessert. [Zester Daily] -- How to open your own pop-up restaurant. [Forbes via food52] -- Pie-a-day #45, or white peach-brown sugar tart. [Good Food] -- Ricardo Zarate and Gary Menes cook a dinner ben ... More >>

Mrs. Obama Approves: McDonald's Selling Apples Trimming Calories

iirraa/flickrApples at McDonald's​ Last week, First Lady Michelle Obama and James Gavin III practically shed tears of joy over Wal-Mart's professed commitment to selling good food cheaper and expanding into barren Whole Foods-deprived "food deserts." Gavin said, perhaps jokingly, that he hope ... More >>

Granny Bandit: In Light of Arrest, We Honor Her Bold SoCal Legacy (and Sweet Head Scarf)

Making Louise proud​We see a lot of unlikely bandits come through these parts. Few, however, are as head-turning as the elusive (well, until her arrest today) Granny Bandit, a 50- to 80-year-old blur of badass suburban crime, circa 1950s, with a dark Dodge Neon for a getaway vehicle. Various ... More >>

Romance Novels Are Alive. Reality TV? Not So Much

Stage Raw: The Crucible

New Theater ReviewsTheater Awards ReportTheater Awards Slide-Show by Timothy Norris​Photo by Byron Turk is from Theatre Banshee's production of The Crucible, which critic Amy Lyons argues is a powerful manifestation of our culture of fear; Bill Raden was less impressed with Lauren Gunderson's new ... More >>

Demand Media, eHow Factory in Santa Monica, Already Worth $1.9 Billion: Retarded Web Searches Prevail

It's no Gehry, but Demand Media's oceanfront headquarters do just fine​In an unassuming mid-rise office building on the Santa Monica cliffs (1299 Ocean Avenue, to be exact), the nation's most profitable "journalistic" machine is hard at work -- churning out those short, un-researched half-answ ... More >>

Wal-Mart Slashing Salt, Sugar, Fat AND Prices

absurd_hero/Flickr​ Wal-Mart has long been one of American citizens' most reliable suppliers of unhealthy packaged foods. Today, as The New York Times reports, the company has proclaimed its intention to, over the next five years, reduce the levels of sodium, fat, and sugar in thousands of it ... More >>

Shoddy Downtown L.A. Mall May Be Getting Target

​Los Angeles Downtown News reports a Target store may be moving in to the 7 Fig mall, which, despite the pretentious name, has been struggling of late. Downtown residents, who rejoiced when the area became a bit more livable with the opening of a Ralph's grocery store in 2007, can now look f ... More >>

5 Most Disgusting Items In The Trader Joe's Freezer Aisle

Trader Joe's is really inexpensive. To be honest, it is at times somewhat frighteningly so. But we continue to shop there, mainly because of those low prices, their large wine selection, snappy packaging and generally friendly staff. It is a brand we've come to trust, without ever really stopping to ... More >>

Smoked Out

Walmart Fires Employee For Off-The-Job Medical Marijuana Use

​This could give those long-opposed to Walmart's planned expansion in the city of Los Angeles more ammunition: The retail giant is catching heat for its recent firing of an employee who used medical marijuana off-the-job to treat his cancer-related pain. Joseph Casias has a tumor pressing aga ... More >>

I'LL BE HOMO FOR CHRISTMAS

Price Wars: Southern California Supermarkets Slash Prices

In an effort to regain customers who are shopping at discount stores and watching their ever-tightening budgets, supermarket chains are lowering prices, sometimes dramatically. Today Vons dropped the prices on 15% of its products in the chain's 274 stores. Ralph's also announced that it's reducing p ... More >>

Nine Inch Nails iPhone App Rejected: Trent Reznor is Pissed, Posts E-Mail from Apple on NIN Forum

On May 2 Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor broke the news via Twitter that Apple had rejected the updated NIN iPhone app because it contained "objectionable content," specifically lyrics on the album The Downward Spiral. Needless to say, Reznor is pissed. After posting Apple's rejection e-mail on the NI ... More >>

Home Depot Throws in the Trowel in Sunland-Tujunga Fight

Inglewood had its war with WalMart,  Glassell Park fought to keep Home Depot out of an old Kmart site. And now one of the other great neighborhood v. big-box store battles is apparently over -- again won by a community determined to keep a retail behemoth from landing its extra-large footprint ... More >>

Fatherhood Lessons From Money Guru Robert Kiyosaki

Rich dad invents money, poor dads watch

Waiting for Shwarma

Little Armenia’s Arax Falafel

Party Pains

Hanging out with the Democratic hacks in Sacramento

The Publicists

Screen and Be Seen

A Love Song for Aron's

Darwinian days for indie L.A. record stores — but maybe that’s okay

Low Prices, Widespread Torture

Our new system of global production

The Big Red One

What’s the matter with Oklahoma?

Ports of Cough

What it will take to clean up the mess caused by ships and trucks

Losing Our Shirts

An unhappy New Year looms for American apparel makers

The Gospel Hours

Networks retool primetime for religious Republicanism

Going Back to Ohio

Bush trolls for votes in the land of closing factories

Sore Winners (and the Rest of Us) in George Bush’s America

Surrender at the Supermarket

The national failure of the grocery workers’ union

To Speak or Not To Speak

A mixed week for free-speech rulings

Letters

CitySweep

Black on the Block

Can Degnan have its world stage and Wal-Mart, too?

A Pet Peeve

Bill to protect pets gets amended into near oblivion

Labor’s Pain

Barbara Ehrenreich talks about clerking at Wal-Mart, living on the minimum wage, and her new book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

The Crank Coast

Way up, way out

Stop To Eat the Daisies

Venus Rising

Natalie Portman is Where the Heart Is