"Chick-Fil-A has young workers and I consistently find them to be the most polite, helpful, and non-confrontational."
The thing about Chick-Fil-A is, by all accounts they have a strong corporate culture in how they treat their employees - diversity issues not withstanding of course. If you treat people well, they feel they have a reason to do their job well. Remember what happened right before Kmart started to fall apart - they became known as one of the absolute worst places to work. It's not just about who they hire - no matter how old, experienced or confident those people are - it's also about how they treat people, and how many reasons they give their employees to either like or despise their jobs. I've worked in fast food, retail (including Walmart), retail inventory, sold bus tickets, handled lost luggage delivery for an airline and been an IT manager for one of the largest multi-national corporations in the world. And every place I go, you can see the corporate attitudes toward the employees reflected in the behavior and attitudes of those employees. On Glassdoor, 75% of people reviewing Chick-fil-a would recommend the job to someone else, only 56% of people working at Walmart do. That is telling, considering in most communities Chick-fil-a is still starting at minimum wage whereas Walmart at least shoots for a buck or two over it.
Also folks, don't forget that there are an awful lot of people in this country right now, who simply cannot afford to spend $40 or more on a pair of shoes. That's why Payless going down is so unfortunate. There have been times in my life where I was lucky to be able to afford to spend $10 on a pair - and when I was a single mom with a growing boy (he's 21 now but he never stopped growing long enough to have spurts back then), who went through as many as 3 shoe sizes in a year, Payless was a lifesaver for me. Not to mention that I've seen $70 shoes from DSW wear out just as fast as $20 shoes from Payless. Payless served a really important and sadly growing market - the working poor.