A Walmart in Canton, Ohio, made headlines when it was revealed, a week before American Thanksgiving, that it was holding a food drive.
Nope, not for the less fortunate members of its own community. For some of its own staff members.
Walmart has defended this, saying it shows how wonderful it is that its associates (as it classily dubs its low-paid employees) care about one another.
Yeah, I'm sure it's not demoralizing at all to work at a company that rewards its CEO with $20.7 million last year, while giving many of its workers so little that they need charity to put food on their tables.
McDonald's, meanwhile, has started offering its employees odd advice, including to eat their food in small bites, so they feel fuller quicker.
That'll help keep their stomachs from rumbling if their only source of income is the Golden Arches.
Of course, McDonald's doesn't expect you to just work for them. Their own budget calculator, to "help" their employees, includes a second job.
The company's McResources line was also recently recorded advising a 10-year employee - who still makes minimum wage, of course - to apply for food stamps and other government programs to keep her head above water.
Studies show that, in the United States, one in five families of fast food workers live below the poverty line, and 52 per cent of them rely on government programs like Medicaid and food stamps.
That's bad compared to the 25 per cent of the workforce that uses government programs - but that simply makes me wonder why 25 per cent of working Americans also can't make ends meet.
In the past couple of years, there have been rumblings from the world of fast food and the frontline retail sector.
Low-paid workers have been trying sporadically to organize into unions, have staged walkouts, and are starting to demand a living wage. So far, their demands have been largely ignored.
This is stupid.
If you're the CEO of a large company, you should be sharpening your pencil and slashing your own salary and distributing it among your employees.
Maybe you don't want to do this unilaterally - maybe you're worried it will cut into your profits too much if you actually pay your workers a living wage, something that allows them to cover rent and food and save up a little.
In that case, millionaires of the world, I would advise you to start lobbying for higher minimum wages and stronger union laws.
I'm serious. Because there are a couple of ways this can go, and not all of them are good for the super-rich.
About the least-bad scenario (from the perspective of the private jet class) is that eventually, once the middle class has been ground down to a fine powder, the poor will simply vote for new politicians who will cram living wage laws down the throats of the business elite.
Most of the other scenarios involve torches and pitchforks, or angry guys with beards and AK-47s. Those don't tend to end well for anyone, rich or poor.
I know that most of the super-wealthy CEOs have their empathy surgically removed around the first time they occupy a corner office, but this is about pure self-interest.
What's going on now is partly about wages, but it's partly about respect, too. It doesn't matter if you call your workers associates or partners or friendly-buddies.
If you treat them with disdain, and foist their problems on the taxpayer, neither the workers nor the other taxpayers will mind one bit if you fall from your great height.
Matthew Claxton writes for the Langley Advance.
