Hobo Chicken

Hobo Chicken coming to Walmart

Hobo is short for Homeward Bound, but everyone associates the meaning with regular transient homelessness and its accoutrements. "The chickens are coming home to roost" is a phrase recently resurrected in the scathing essay On The Justice of Roosting Chickens by Ward Churchill regarding the attacks on the World Trade Center, September 11, 2001.

Not to spoil the recipe of its namesake, Hobo Chicken represents the arrival of one's comeuppance in the form of just rewards, which could be construed as good or bad depending on your perspective.

If perhaps you are a national franchise such as Hostess, Chic-fil-A or Papa John's Pizza, you have certain institutionalized character flaws that will invite Hobo Chicken, but Hobo Chicken has his sights set on a much larger prize, Walmart, and of all the times of the year, Black Friday of 2012.Target also faces Hobo Chicken.

This seems to be a growing trend. For decades people didn't have a choice but to accept lower wages, and because they accepted lower wages their living standards suffered, they had to shop for steeper and steeper bargains, trample over each other to get the last Cabbage Patch Kid or Pokemon. Now businesses are blaming the workers for accepting the lower wages. A Manpower representative in a Reuters interview called it a "wage scar caused by workers accepting lower wages," not that employers had anything to do with it.

The employers had little choice but to continue discounting their supply, because they don't have a second mirror that allows them to see the backs of their own heads, or they would see a target painted by who else, Hobo Chicken.