Like most switched-on retail giants, America’s Wal-mart have got on the Twitter bandwagon and are sharing their corporate thoughts with anyone who’ll listen via the latest social networking phenomenon.

Unfortunately, they also kind of missed the point of Twitter’s 140-character tweet limit and posted a 3,379-word Terms Of Use agreement for all new followers to read and comply with if they wanted to subscribe to the dull blatherings of the Wal-Mart marketing dudes.

As someone cleverer than us worked out, the EULA lasts for 23,056 characters, a whopping 165 tweets. Since there was some initial online kerfuffle about it, Wal-Mart have trimmed it all down to a much more user-friendly page that they’re calling ‘Wal-Mart’s Twitter External Discussion Guidelines.’ They even use cool internet buzz words like ‘win’ and ‘fail.’

Fail.

Sure, stores are allowed to raise the price of goods, anytime they want. But laughing in your face about how you missed out on a cheaper deal? That’s just plain wrong. So thank you, Wal-Mart, for stripping folk of those tatters of hope they so desperately clung onto in this year of hell.

Let’s hope we see these deals in ASDA soon, so we have yet another reason to despise corporate America:

[The Consumerist]

Asda have announced that they’re turning their back on celebrities for their 2008 Christmas campaign. It could be because they don’t want to be saddled with a loose cannon like Kerry Katona but they reckon they’re doing it because they want “to return to traditional community values, which remain at the heart of our business.”

Indeed, their parent company WalMart have had very strong links with traditional communities down the years, allegedly causing the collapse of scores of small businesses as they ruthlessly spread their empire across the United States.

Good to see that Asda had the balance just right back in 1980. The high-profile celeb is present and correct (Hattie Jacques) but her mammoth fee (probably a skip filled with iced buns) is offset by the fact that someone has knocked out the ad’s music on the kind of Bontempi keyboard that went for just £25 or so back then.