Wal-Mart has been selling porn and rocks disguised as gaming systems. This may be an issue with their customer service policies (returned "purchases"), but that doesn't absolve Wal-Mart of responsibility. For anyone who ever celebrated birthday or a Christmas as a small child, this is unacceptable. It's up to Wal-Mart, as one of the world's largest video game retailers, to step up and fix this ethical issue.

Wal-Mart's the only one smiling, while little kids are crying. Now it seems that this is a problem with their returned merchandise system, but how about a little ownership of responsibility from the world's largest retailer? Being one of the largest distributors of video games, Wal-Mart has a ton of influence on all major youth demographics. What's even worse is that these systems were packaged as "new" and neither customer nor cashier was the wiser.

Here's the thing. Wal-Mart earns so much ridiculous amounts of surplus (yes, you can have surplus $) revenue that it can afford to overlook an item here or there or "lose track" of an item in the customer service department, and it wouldn't make a chink in the balance sheets. The problem, then, is ethical.

And this lack of regard for ethics strips the consumers of our peace of mind. The next time I want to go get a DS for my little girl cousin's 8th birthday, how will I know the DS isn't loaded full of nudie pics? Or that the box doesn't just contain a lump of dog crap wrapped in hentai paper?

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