In Wal-Mart we trust

Lost your job? Work at Wal-Mart.

Stop cringing. In a market with rising unemployment, the world's largest retailer is getting even bigger and it's going to need help.

Wal-Mart plans to add 22,000 employees in the next year to staff new domestic stores. This is a lower number than 2008, when the retailer hired 33,000 people, but it's still expanding while so many companies are contracting or closing up shop.

Sure, most of these are hourly jobs. And of course, Wal-Mart is famously non-union. But, and I'm going to get flamed here, show me another successful U.S. company that still adheres to those higher standards and I'll bet it's a company struggling to stay alive in today's marketplace. This is the nature of retail work today, and it's only going to become more so, as companies increasingly try to be like Wal-Mart.