Years ago it was popular for companies to sponsor a day for employees to take their kids to the office to see where mom or dad worked. My wife got stuck with organizing one of the days for her employer.

In an introductory exercise, she had the kids sit around a conference table and take turns in answering the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Our son answered last. The extroverted jokester said, “I want to be a Walmart greeter.”

That answer is not the reason my wife and I buy most of our groceries at Walmart and none at Whole Foods, although Whole Foods is much closer to our house.

Nor are lower prices the driving reason, especially given our comfortable station in life—although our frugality makes us appreciate that we can buy the same organic stuff at Walmart at considerably lower prices.

Incidentally, frugality is a foolish trait, in that it will result in the Biden tax plan pillaging our savings and estate after a lifetime of living below our means. Saving money to have it confiscated later is evidence of not being very bright. Some will find this commentary to be additional evidence. Being of average intelligence, I’m okay with conceding the point.

Another example of our frugality is the ten-year-old RAV-4 that we drive to Walmart, a car that would look out of place in the parking lot of Whole Foods, which abounds with late-model Range Rovers, BMWs, Mercedes, Priuses, and Teslas—many of which are driven by bleach-blonde women with expensive fingernails and toenails, dressed in expensive torn jeans or skin-tight yoga pants, which reveal in intimate detail that organic arugula doesn’t make a butt smaller.

Nor do we shop at Walmart because we like big-box stores. In fact, we dislike them as much as we dislike other behemoths, including big media, big banks, big government, big teacher unions, big federal deficits, big butts in yoga pants, and big Amazon, which owns Whole Foods. Sadly, the corner grocer, baker, butcher, drug store, and farm stand of our youth don’t exist where we now live, or, for that matter, just about anywhere else in America. Likewise, store owners no longer live in the same neighborhood as their customers, unless by chance you live in the same hoity-toity hood as Jeff Bezos.

So, why do we shop at Walmart instead of Whole Foods?

It’s a class thing. Being oddballs and contrarians, we don’t see ourselves as members of the social class that shops at Whole Foods or the opposite one that shops at Walmart. But we’re more comfortable with the latter because the Walmart class is not pretentious or phony and better reflects our working-class roots.

There used to be four social classes in America: upper class, upper-middle class, middle class, and working class. Or in Marxist terms, there were three classes: bourgeoisie (capitalists), petite bourgeoisie (shopkeepers and artisans), and proletariat (serfs and working class).

Today, for all intents and purposes, there are only two classes: knowledge workers with a college degree and everyone else.

There are sub-groups within each of these, and one of the most influential is a subspecies of the degreed class. It has the scientific name of Platycercini and the common name of broad-tailed parrot. Its natural habitat is not only Whole Foods but also Trader Joe’s, Apple stores, Starbucks, and any store, restaurant, bar, health club, neighborhood, or vacation spot considered hip, trendy, and in accord with the governing zeitgeist.

Platycercini can be as tribal and easily led as the non-degreed but doesn’t have the excuse of being uneducated. Of course, more schooling doesn’t necessarily equate to more wisdom, especially when it’s a curriculum of miseducation.

What follows will be generalizations and stereotypes, but, hey, generalizations and stereotypes are back in vogue, especially the one that says all people of color are oppressed and disadvantaged, and all whites are oppressors and privileged. (As a swarthy Italian of peasant stock, I don’t know which I am.)

There are exceptions, but the Platycercini tend to dress alike, look alike, speak alike, think alike, vote alike, and parrot alike what they were taught alike in college, which is when they stopped learning. They see themselves as Green, woke, progressive, tolerant, educated, and open-minded, especially about racial diversity and social justice. Their virtue-signaling and sloganeering match their self-image.

Advertisers know them well, which is why so many commercials and ads spout hooey about the social responsibility and diversity of companies instead of the features and benefits of their products. This leads to such ridiculous messaging as the commercial that equates a Subaru to love, when in fact, Subaru made Japanese fighter planes flown by kamikazes in World War II. Equally ridiculous is a Toyota commercial touting the company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, when in fact, Japan is one of the most racially homogenous nations in the world.

The lifestyle of the Platycercini doesn’t match their self-image, however. It’s not green to live in a huge house, or to heat and cool a second home, or to narcissistically put every moment of your life on the cloud (i.e., on power-hungry server farms), or to spew tons of carbon on vacations to exotic locales. It’s not tolerant to look down on the patrons of Walmart and other undesirables. It’s not woke to be unconcerned about working stiffs who toil in a factory or mine or live in a town suffering from deindustrialization and drug overdoses.

Speaking of factories and mines, few of the Platycercini have ever been in one, or, for that matter, have ever done any form of manual labor. But they tend to be opposed to mining for environmental reasons, in a display of willful ignorance about the source of the rare earth minerals in their gadgets and EVs.

Many of the Platycercini are immune from the negative consequences of voting for bigger government and a more intrusive regulatory state, because they are either uber-wealthy or work for the government or work in one of the millions of private-sector jobs that depend on the regulatory state, such as lobbyists, tax attorneys, regulatory specialists and consultants, and software coders who develop the regulatory reporting systems for businesses. A large number of these regulatory-related jobs are held by Republicans who see themselves as conservatives.

The Platycercini are for diversity and inclusion as long as it means associating with so-called minorities who are knowledge workers like themselves and in the same socioeconomic class as themselves—and as long as they are insulated from the crime, blight, bad schools, and broken families in the barrio, inner-city slums, and forsaken rural towns. Similarly, it’s easy for them to be for the mass immigration of unskilled and poorly educated migrants when the benefits of such immigration accrue to themselves and the costs are borne elsewhere by others.

They claim to care about the poor and black lives but are largely silent about one of the major causes of poverty, crime, and poor test scores: fatherless families.

Due to misguided social welfare policies and cultural rot allowed to stand by the Platycercini, the percent of such families has more than doubled over the last 60 years. Fatherless families are now the majority in some neighborhoods, communities, and ethnocultural groups. Yet in one of the most glaring double standards in human history, the broad-tailed parrots do their utmost to see that their offspring have two parents in the nest.

It used to be that higher education would bring introspection, healthy skepticism, continual questioning, a passion for free speech, and a knowledge of what one doesn’t know. Now it brings conformity of thinking, speech codes, phoniness, and hypocrisy—all evidence that the brainwashing of higher education is very effective.

Ironically, there is more diversity of class and race among the employees and customers at Walmart than at Whole Foods, ranging from poor whites with broken bodies from a lifetime of manual labor to recent immigrants of all colors, to the well-off like my wife and me, and to the African-American greeter who exudes friendliness and enthusiasm as he says hello when we enter the store and gives a hearty “Thanks for coming” when we leave the store.

Our son had the right idea when he said he wanted to be a Walmart greeter.