Wal-Mart is receiving as many as 25,000 applications for its 325 job openings. At an acceptance rate of about 1%, it sounds like one might just have a better chance at getting into Harvard Business School than applying for a job at Wal-Mart (okay, yes, the applicant pools are different, as well as many other factors). We hear every day that Wal-Mart pays little to no benefits to its employees (47% of employees are covered today), it’s average pay is 30% lower than that of Costco’s, the retailer even made headlines for its plans to target younger, healthier workers by considering education benefits and the incorporation of physical activity in every employee’s workday (such as collecting shopping carts), to save money on benefits. Clearly, Wal-Mart has a lot of work to do if it wants to earn merit badges for employee treatment, but the question still stands… if the jobs are so bad, why is demand so high?

Either Wal-Mart is providing desirable jobs, improving the lives of 325 residents of Evergreen Park, Illinois (and Oakland, California which received 11,000 applicants for its ~325 Wal-Mart jobs), or, as a union representative from UFCW accused, Wal-Mart is fudging its application numbers, which is clearly not doing the right thing and is a story in itself.

The loudest voices against Wal-Mart come from unions (for example, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union hosts wakeupwalmart.com), which clearly have something to gain by forcing the world’s largest company to unionize its labor. When an organization has something to gain, I suggest not drinking the Kool-Aid until you’ve thought about how that might influence what you are being told.

In offering desirable jobs, Wal-Mart is making a positive impact on the people who choose to work there. I don’t expect Wal-Mart to ever top the charts for its labor compensation standards, as they exist today, but if they were that bad, no one would work there, right? After all, the 1.8 million full-time employees of Wal-Mart don’t have to work there, they choose to. Dotherightthing is the only place where people’s voices aren’t drowned out by representatives of big and loud organizations. Do you want your voice to go unheard? Let’s settle this once and for all. If Wal-Mart is truly receiving tens of thousands of applications for the positions it creates at each newly-opened store, and it can also be proven that Wal-Mart employees are not better off by accepting these jobs, I’ll go work there for a month. Am I nuts? Am I in support of non-union, low wage labor? Absolutely not; I am just not that easily convinced. Prove me wrong, and I’ll go work at Wal-Mart, assuming I make the cut.