There are many other capitalist societies that don't put corporate profits before everything else. Check out the Scandinavian countries, for example. And as lousy as the cashier job is, it's a job.

It's only been since the Reagan era that "shareholder value" became the be all and end all. In the post war era, America practiced stakeholder capitalism, where labor, community, and business all were taken into account. This gave birth to a robust middle class. So throwing up one's hands and saying, well, that's capitalism, doesn't cut it for me.