Yes, I'll admit that it's pretty low-rent on my part, but a few pages of People of WalMart made me laugh so hard that my eyes are still stinging from the tears. (Disclaimer: Some photos are definitely not safe for work; many are kind of painful, actually.) I worked in retail during and immediately following college, and thus occasionally saw a less flattering side of humanity--and that even before WalMart had made it this far north. So there's a certain cathartic schadenfreude in it for me.
But the point of "sharing" that site is not to indulge any sense of elitism. For all I know, some of the fashion choices may have been the only choices folks had. On the other hand, letting your kid play with a plastic back over her/his head while you wheel your cart through the aisles is just plain messed-up. No excuses. Anyone who calls that "elitist" needs a serious head-check. So when WalMart (or any other business) deliberately cultivates a lowest common denominator mentality, they deserve every last bit of ridicule they get. In spades.
So I have to wonder about what whether other WalMart customers--those who don't willfully ignore baseline hygiene or social norms--actually think twice before coming back. But the notion doesn't strictly apply to brick-and-mortar retail. A post on the Startup Lessons Learned blog from a few days ago ("The Cardinal Sin of Community Management") made an interesting point about the expectations of the community that a business can build. In the online world, one of the functions of a community manager is to protect the community at large from the damage done by trolls--i.e. the web's equivalent of the slob sporting a "No fat chicks" t-shirt outside the ladies' changing room.
Obviously, the business model of Big Box retail need not concern itself with any notion of community. Then again, anyone can snap Failblog-calibre photos with a cellphone before any clerk or manager is the wiser. That's not so much a hazard for online venues, mainly because screenshots of text posts aren't usually so entertaining. Usually. But a single troll can do so much more damage in an online venue because the interactivity creates a whole different web of transactions (monetized or not). Plus, the online species likes to linger at the scene of the carnage to savor the damage--or, like car bombers, wait for a crowd to gather before detonating the next round.
Thus I think that there's something instructive in the notion behind the of People of Walmart site, even if you don't ever plan to visit it. If anything, troll-control is an exercise in Integrated Pest Management, which requires a detailed understanding of where the community segments fall on the twin axes of freedom of speech and ability to absorb the damage of anti-social behavior. Not to mention an accurate accounting of the costs--direct and indirect--of prevention vs. damage control.
