…in her new anti-corporate-scheming book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, makes the provocative allegation that (as paraphrased by a Salon.com reviewer) “IKEA is as bad as Wal-Mart.”

To Ms. Shell, it doesn’t matter which social caste a company courts. As long as it imports kilotons of future-landfill consumerist stuff from low-wage countries, she doesn’t like it.

Her consistency is a welcome change from the classism of many anti-corporate leftists, whose disdain for any particular corporation seems to increase with that corporation’s connection to “the wrong kind of white people.” Thus, we’re all supposed to loathe Wal-Mart (purveyors of cheap disposables to stereotyped white trash), but be at least ambivalent about Taret (purveyors of near-identical cheap disposables to hip social climbers).