Stay classy, Wal-Mart

When you're a multi-kazillion dollar business like Wal-Mart you have to have your priorities straight. Making fat stacks of cash? Check. Increasing your market share? Check. Crushing unionization of your workers? Check. Engaging in pointless, time wasting, money wasting legal battles so as you can look heartless and shirk any and all responsibility for anything you do? Double check.

Wal-Mart Stores has spent a year and more than a million dollars in legal fees battling a $7,000 fine that federal safety officials assessed after shoppers trampled a Wal-Mart employee to death at a store on Long Island on the day after Thanksgiving in 2008.

Of course! If they don't spend millions fighting this, why they'll be responsible for all sorts of piddling fines resulting from easily preventable deaths of their employees. I mean this is just another example of small business fighting against the draconian socialist overreach of the man.

$7,000? Wal-Mart isn't made of money! Well, not literally. Not yet, anyway. But I'm sure there's some sort of important legal reason that they're spending millions to fight a minuscule fine for.

But in fighting the federal fine, Wal-Mart is arguing that the government is improperly trying to define “crowd trampling” as an occupational hazard that retailers must take action to prevent.

Yeah, this is an important precedent to have on the books. I mean the government is always trying to butt its nose into a business to collect money for "crowd trampling" regulation violations. How do you think they plan to pay for health care? Human stampeding fines.

So stay classy, Wal-Mart. You would rather spend millions than pay a measly seven grand in OSHA fines and admit that maybe you should have some better safety protocols for when you try to herd human cattle through your stores for Chinese made lawn furniture that's 3 cents cheaper than at Target. Priorities.