A
    Alice Hines

    Alice Hines

    Contributor

  • Walmart To Meet On Gun Control

    Acknowledging that it underestimated the Obama administration's expectations about its involvement in gun control talks, Walmart said Wednesday company representatives would attend a meeting at The White House on Thursday to discuss firearms. Walmart initially declined to have a representative attend the White House meeting, citing scheduling conflicts in a statement given to the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. When asked for comment by The Huffington Post, a spokesman referred to the press release and didn't respond to further questions.

  • Family Dollar Execs: Shoppers Couldn't Afford Toys This Holiday Season

    For the poorest Americans, this year's holiday season offered little respite from the lingering Great Recession. The latest sign came Thursday as one of the nation's largest dollar store chains -- which caters heavily to customers with low incomes -- said that December sales had been meager, an indication that many families bought fewer toys for children, and likely scrimped to finance necessities, such as groceries, instead. "On the low end of the spectrum people are still hurting quite a bit," said Chris Christopher, an economist at IHS Global Insight.

  • FBI Monitored Occupy Wall Street As Potential Terrorist, Criminal Threat

    According to internal documents newly released by the FBI, the agency spearheaded a nationwide law enforcement effort to investigate and monitor the Occupy Wall Street movement. The internal papers were obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice fund via a Freedom of Information Act Request. "This production ... is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement," wrote Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, the fund's executive director, in a press release Saturday.

  • Another Company Slashes Employee Hours To Skirt Obamacare

    A convenience store chain with roughly 150 stores in mid-Atlantic states has in recent weeks aggressively cut employee hours to avoid having to provide medical insurance under the national health care reform known as Obamacare, The Huffington Post has learned. Royal Farms, a Baltimore-based chain, recently reduced most of its full-time and part-time workforce to below 30 hours a week rather than provide health insurance as will soon be required under Obamacare, according to workers in Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and Pennsylvania. According to these workers, the managers specifically said the company was reducing its number of full-time workers in reaction to Obamacare, which requires that larger firms provide health care to all employees working more than 30 hours a week or pay penalties.

  • Walmart Pulls Gun From Website In Wake Of Shooting

    Walmart has pulled the Bushmaster Patrolman's Carbine M4A3 Rifle from its web store, The Nation reported on Monday. The gun, a military-style assault weapon that uses .223 caliber ammunition, is in the same family of guns as the one reportedly used by Adam Lanza to kill 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary school on Friday. In addition to the one offered by Walmart, there are several other Bushmaster rifles that use .223 caliber ammunition.

  • Texas Gun Store Owner Offers Teachers Discount After Newtown Shooting

    "I was stunned, but not necessarily shocked, when I heard what happened [in Newtown]," said Crockett Keller, who owns Keller's Riverside Store in Mason, Texas. Politicians have been promising to crack down on guns after 20-year-old Adam Lanza murdered 26 people -- including 20 children -- at Sandy Hook Elementary on Friday. On Sunday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) announced plans to introduce a bill that would ban assault weapons, and on Monday even staunch political supporters of the National Rifle Association were adjusting their tones.

  • Not Poor Enough For Medicaid: Walmart Workers

    If state governors follow through on plans to oppose the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare, one substantial group of low-wage workers appears vulnerable to going without medical coverage: people who work at Walmart. The world’s largest retailer recently outlined a new policy that will exclude from health coverage newly hired employees who work fewer than 30 hours per week, as The Huffington Post reported this month. Experts described that move as an attempt by Walmart to shift the burden of providing health coverage to the government -- specifically, to Medicaid, the insurance program for the poor.

  • Macy's Betrays "Christmas Spirit" By Lobbying For Tax Cuts, Says Progressive Group

    On Thursday, the Progressive Congress -- a nonprofit representing 75 liberal congressmen -- announced that it gathered 100,000 signatures for a petition urging the department store's CEO, Terry Lundgren, to drop out of a high-profile lobbying group. Lundgren is one of 71 CEOs of public companies in the Fix The Debt coalition, which is lobbying to narrow the deficit by scaling back programs like Medicare and Social Security. Macy's declined to comment to The Huffington Post for this story.

  • American Apparel CEO Called Employee 'Fag,' 'Wanna Be Jew,' Lawsuit Says

    Dov Charney, chief executive officer of American Apparel, the clothing retailer best known for manufacturing its clothes in the United States, stands accused of conduct that seems more typical of an overseas sweat shop boss. A lawsuit filed last week in a Los Angeles court by a former store manager accuses Charney of choking him, throwing dirt at him and deriding him with an anti-gay slur. American Apparel believes the lawsuit is based on allegations that are "contrived and untrue," Peter Schey, an attorney for Charney and the retail chain, said in an emailed statement.

  • Walmart Sends Taxpayers The Doctor's Bill

    Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, plans to begin denying health insurance to newly hired employees who work fewer than 30 hours a week, according to a copy of the company’s policy obtained by The Huffington Post. Under the policy, slated to take effect in January, Walmart also reserves the right to eliminate health care coverage for certain workers if their average workweek dips below 30 hours -- something that happens with regularity and at the direction of company managers. Walmart declined to disclose how many of its roughly 1.4 million U.S. workers are vulnerable to losing medical insurance under its new policy.

  • NYC Fast Food Workers Go On Strike For Better Pay

    At 11:30 am on Thursday, the start of the lunch hour rush, 100-some raucous protesters swarmed a Burger King near New York City’s Penn Station, chanting and holding up signs decrying low wages at the restaurant and other New York fast food purveyors. Standing behind a metal barricade outside the store, the crowd included clergy, union organizers and workers from Burger King and other fast food restaurants who had gone on strike earlier in the day. “If there’s no workers inside, there’s no money for [Burger King],” said Saavedra Jantuah, a cashier who was scheduled to be working behind the counter.

  • Walmart Strike Hits 100 Cities: Do Black Friday Shoppers Care?

    As she neared the entrance of a Dallas Walmart shortly before midnight on the eve of the shopping frenzy known as Black Friday, Tammy was both shocked and thrilled to encounter a group of more than 40 protesters. "Walmart cuts hours and benefits to push people out," said Tammy, using her phone to capture video of the protest.

  • Black Friday Strikers To Walmart: It's On!

    On Thanksgiving afternoon, as freshly stuffed Americans prepared for the shopping bacchanal known as Black Friday, hundreds of Walmart workers readied themselves for a wholly different experience: joining strikes and labor actions planned for the next two days at some 1,000 Walmart stores around the country. Here in Dallas, as well as in Miami and the San Francisco area, Walmart employees were planning to walk off work and demonstrate early Thursday evening, as shoppers began to arrive in pursuit of the ultra-cheap deals known as doorbusters. The strikers sought to protest low wages and a lack of benefits, while also challenging what they allege has been a pattern of Walmart's retaliation against workers who try to organize.

  • Twinkies Now Worth More Dead Than Alive

    Steve Ettlinger, author of Twinkie, Deconstructed, a book on the ingredients found in processed foods, received 13 interview requests by Friday afternoon to comment on the bankruptcy of junk-food maker Hostess Brands. Ettlinger, a writer living in New York City, first realized how worked up people got about Twinkies after his book came out in 2007. "The popularity of Twinkies was something I discovered," he said.

  • No Way Up: Walmart’s Workers Decry Dead-End Poverty

    Two years ago, when she started working at the deli counter of a Walmart in Illinois, Lisa hoped that her job would amount to the beginning of a career, one that would pay enough to cover her bills and enable her to stay current on her student loan debt. With no alternatives at hand, Walmart now seems like a dead-end to poverty, she says. Lisa's experience sheds light on why a group claiming to represent tens of thousands of Walmart workers nationwide is planning strikes and other labor actions at as many as 1,000 stores next week on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year.

  • Walmart Strikers Promise Huge Black Friday Showdown With 1,000 Protests

    An organization of Walmart workers is planning a series of strikes next week that they hope will paralyze the world's largest retailer on the biggest shopping day of the year. Employees will stage 1,000 unique protests around the country on Black Friday, a United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) official said on a conference call Thursday afternoon. The events, most of which will take place at Walmart stores, will include walkouts, flash mobs, and "educating" shoppers on the workers' plight.

  • Budweiser's Risky Move

    For food and beverage companies, crowdsourcing new flavors has become nearly as trendy as salted caramel or pumpkin spice. Early next year, Budweiser will release "Black Crown," a new beer with more alcohol that emerged from a competition this summer surveying 25,000 consumers at events nationwide. "We've always done focus groups and product testing, but this was a much larger scale," said Rob McCarthy, vice president of Budweiser in an interview.

  • Gun Maker Stocks Rise On Obama Reelection

    While some Americans on Wednesday were popping champagne to celebrate President Barack Obama's reelection, others were in sporting goods stores buying guns. "People are hedging their bets on what they think is the worst case scenario, which is that Obama will ban some guns completely," said Steve Fincher, a sales manager at Guns & Gear in Lavonia, Ga. The store has seen an uptick in sales since the summer, particularly of handguns with bigger magazine capacities, according to Fincher. On Wednesday, gun maker Smith & Wesson's stock rose 9.62 percent, a jump analysts said was due to a predicted increase in sales following Tuesday's election.

  • Hurricane Sandy Snarls Voters In New York And New Jersey

    Making their way to makeshift voting tents heated by generators or scrambling to find suddenly relocated polling sites from their powerless houses and isolated neighborhoods, millions of voters in New York and New Jersey voted Tuesday, even as many continued to reel from the damage of Hurricane Sandy. Lines stretched for up to one and a half hours at polling stations in some Manhattan neighborhoods, where voters still struggling to regain heat and hot water in their homes withstood 40-degree temperatures and blasts of chilly air. In Hoboken, N.J., a city still pumping out from several feet of flooding, the few voters at several polling stations faced short lines, or no lines at all.

  • Gas Shortage Crippling Sandy Aid From Food Banks And Charities

    At 3 p.m. on the Friday after Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, the St. Jacobi church in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, was overflowing with boxes of water bottles, piles of clothes and volunteers baking bread pudding.