I earned my Ph.D. in psychic income management from Wal-Mart
I remember when I could drive a block away to George’s Market drive-thru window and be home with a gallon of milk in 10 minutes. For years, I shopped at the neighborhood delicatessen, The Store, where every apple had the owner’s hands-on sheen, where your groceries were not only bagged but loaded into your car. Or you could call and have that beautiful fresh turkey breast and anything else delivered promptly to your door.
I’d never been inside a Wal-Mart until 2012 when we retired in St. George. We found it such a spectacle. It became “Date Night Friday.” If my husband Peter isn’t on the golf course, you’ll find him at Wal-Mart, the closest grocery store to our home in Hidden Valley. “Closest” means a mile to the triple roundabout where you dodge four to eight semi-trailer trucks, occasionally watch one tip over, and then it’s a half-mile trek through the parking lot to four sets of double entry doors. When you’re inside the Golden Sun store, you’ll find it’s three blocks deep and four to six blocks wide. Grocery shopping at Wal-Mart is a day trip.
If you have a frontal lobe and can count to 12, you can get a job at Wal-Mart.
Honestly, I asked an employee where I could find the WD-40.
“Can’t you see how busy I am, I can’t help you right now?” She was so abruptly deranged that for a minute I thought I should give her a hand. I actually apologized to her for not helping me, for not doing her job. How does that work?
The scary woman who looked like a Star Trek troll on aisle 16 was very protective of her territory.
“What cigarettes are you buying?” she asked me.
“I don’t smoke,” I said. “I’m not buying cigarettes.” I soon learned that I was mistakenly in the 10-item lane where you had to buy cigarettes to be there. A heated discussion ensued when I began to question the logic of a short line for smokers who could not smoke in their store or their parking lot, and no short line consideration for the white haired older women with knee deficiencies. I would have been willing to move to another line with my 10 items had she not begun throwing my eggs and tomatoes all over. In finality, she buzzed for the manager, who politely escorted me from the store. I chose that it be without my groceries.
Where do they find these people? How many rehab centers or mental half-way institutions are there? The man restocking produce was rearranging grapes, putting the obviously older ones in front of the perfectly fresh ones. When I reached in back for the perfectly fresh ones, he told me, “No, you have to take these first,” pointing to the ugly ones. I actually left and spied on the grape Nazi until he moved on. Like a thief in the night, I went back to get the good grapes. How does that work?
An elderly woman — yes, one of those — in an automatic cart must not have been too sure about its operation. Don’t they just go forward and backward, start and stop? What an oxymoron that is. They’re meant for people with disabilities, the disabled person being the most unlikely individual to successfully maneuver themselves around rows and rows of grocery shelves. How does that work? Sure enough, with the machine in reverse, she easily dismantled dozens of boxes of cornflakes that almost buried me alive. In her frustration, she overcorrected and brought down a truckload of other groceries while damaging the display materials as well. Whoops! As though it were meant to happen, she continued on her way, leaving an entitled trail of utter chaos. I didn’t see the manager escorting her out of the store.
How does that work?
When I’m a bag lady with my Wal-Mart grocery cart, I won’t be homeless or hungry.
I’ll live at Wal-Mart. Believe me, they’ll never know. In the back of the store, where they stock big packs of water, there are always empty shelves that are deep and long. I’ll curl up on one of those shelves after management leaves and in the morning be the earliest shopper in the aisle. I’ll know exactly where to find the ice cream.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
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