The Slutty Slug

You no doubt have seen “The Video.” A man, in broad daylight, brazenly empties the shelves of a San Francisco Walgreens and casually walks out without any intervention from a nearby guard.

When I say you’ve no doubt seen the video, I am absolutely confident you have, because a recent analysis by the media watchdog FAIR found that the video — taken by ABC7’s Lyanne Melendez — garnered over 300 articles of media coverage and millions of clicks, from the United Kingdom to Mexico to France.

That’s a sizable amount of coverage, indeed, for a single instance of petty theft.

What you no doubt haven’t heard, because it garnered only one article in mainstream media, is that Walgreens settled a $4.5 million wage theft suit last November for robbing its California employees for years. According to plaintiffs, Walgreens failed to pay minimum wages, overtime wages, compensate for meal periods, refused to authorize and permit rest periods, lied on wage statements and engaged in an assortment of alleged illegal business practices — fleecing millions from its low wage workers. Millions that couldn’t be spent on food, diapers, rent, life-saving medicine. Millions whose absence no doubt caused countless hours of stress and mental wear and tear to the check-to-check workers that money was owed.

But because it was spread out over years and the victims were disproportionately people of color — and the suspects faceless executives — it went virtually unnoticed.

Assuming the man in The Video stole the maximum allowed for his misdemeanor charge — $949 — this would mean the Walgreens wage theft story involved 474,183% more theft yet resulted in one story compared to 309. Why? Corporate wage theft, several studies show, is much more prevalent than all other forms of theft — larceny, robbery, car theft — combined, yet is almost never covered in our media, outside of a handful of legal trade publications.

It took 2 weeks of constant meds before I was back to normal-ish, yes, 2 weeks, 14 days. And no, it was not a pleasant 2 weeks from what I remember of them, which is extremely little, as I was mostly a semi-functioning zombie during that period because I didn’t take well to what they had me on. Well, that and the amount of Benadryl that I had to take to keep from scratching at the hives that kept coming back until they were bleeding.

Sleepy baby

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@sage-derby Yes!!!

Here’s a rundown of their general policy, from literally the first article I clicked on just now:

As you might be getting from that, they’re pretty intersex inclusive, too. Here’s a sample of something that’s a little more directly about sex-specific stuff in case you’re thinking “well but they said that was just about pleasure tho”:

They have a lot of sections on their site, but number two is Gender:

“That’s probably just like hetero gender dynamics stuff tho...” Nay nay! Here’s a few of the articles from the first page of their “Gender” section:

They have a disabled section with stuff for chronic pain. There was a link about navigating consent with non-verbal partners. This is an awesome resource, I've never felt so included.