One of the more interesting brief political debates I had in California was on the evil that is Wal-Mart.  One of the terrible things Wal-Mart apparently does is pressure companies to sell their products for less and less until they go out of business.  It was actually amusing to listen to my liberal sister and husband actually arguing for more profits for companies.  The one example they kept bringing up over and over again was that of Vlasic pickles:

A gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is something to behold. The jar is the size of a small aquarium. The fat green pickles, floating in swampy juice, look reptilian, their shapes exaggerated by the glass. It weighs 12 pounds, too big to carry with one hand. The gallon jar of pickles is a display of abundance and excess; it is entrancing, and also vaguely unsettling. This is the product that Wal-Mart fell in love with: Vlasic's gallon jar of pickles.
...
Therein lies the basic conundrum of doing business with the world's largest retailer. By selling a gallon of kosher dills for less than most grocers sell a quart, Wal-Mart may have provided a ser-vice for its customers. But what did it do for Vlasic? The pickle maker had spent decades convincing customers that they should pay a premium for its brand. Now Wal-Mart was practically giving them away. And the fevered buying spree that resulted distorted every aspect of Vlasic's operations, from farm field to factory to financial statement.
...
Finally, Wal-Mart let Vlasic up for air. "The Wal-Mart guy's response was classic," Young recalls. "He said, 'Well, we've done to pickles what we did to orange juice. We've killed it. We can back off.' " Vlasic got to take it down to just over half a gallon of pickles, for $2.79. Not long after that, in January 2001, Vlasic filed for bankruptcy--although the gallon jar of pickles, everyone agrees, wasn't a critical factor.

I later found out that this example was touted in an NPR and PBS storyline... which is probably why it was the only one they mentioned.  As it turned out further into the conversation... the problem wasn't so much that Wal-Mart was denying profits to corporations, but that these companies were increasingly going overseas for portions of their operations.  Ahhh yes.  Outsourcing... the other liberal evil:

Of course, U.S. companies have been moving jobs offshore for decades, long before Wal-Mart was a retailing power. But there is no question that the chain is helping accelerate the loss of American jobs to low-wage countries such as China. Wal-Mart, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s trumpeted its claim to "Buy American," has doubled its imports from China in the past five years alone, buying some $12 billion in merchandise in 2002. That's nearly 10% of all Chinese exports to the United States.

Now then, one of the other classic liberal evils is that of the big bad pharmaceutical industry, and how they're out to make huge profits on the backs of sick people.  So what are the Wal-Mart haters, who also happen to hate drug companies, going to say now that Wal-Mart is going to sell cheap drugs:

Wal-Mart plans to begin selling nearly 300 generic prescription drugs for a sharply reduced price, offering a big lure for bargain-seeking customers and presenting a challenge to competing pharmacy chains.

The world’s biggest retailer said Thursday that it will test its sales program, in which 291 generic drugs will be sold at $4 for a month’s supply, in Florida. The drugs involved provide treatments for conditions ranging from allergies to high-blood pressure.

This ought to be fun.