My life-long quest to avoid Wal Mart
When I pack for the lake, I have one simple goal in mind: to avoid a trip to Wal Mart.
I have no idea what it is about that store that makes me so sad, but I must avoid it all costs, at all times. Don’t get me wrong – I do shop at a no-frills discount grocery store at home regularly. It’s my favorite store. My grocery store is precisely, a “no-frills” grocery store in every way, and doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a discount grocery store. Yet, they know my name when I load my groceries on the belt. (I admit, that may have something to do with the time my boys dropped a watermelon on the floor and it busted; or the time they dropped the jar of spaghetti sauce on the floor, and it broke.)
Wal Mart pretends that it is no-frills – but it’s not. They try to hard to be fancy. For example, their scented candles, packaged with flowers, which say natural scent, but are actually filled with toxic chemicals. They try to hard to look like a department store where better brands are sold, and their prices are not always as cheap as they make them appear to be.
At the lake, as in most small towns across America, the presence of Wal Mart means you are stuck. There is no friendly neighborhood hardware store that lets you buy just 3 nails instead of 20, no Five-and-Dime that has cotton tablecloths instead of poly-blend ones, and no friendly clerks that know your name.
I think that’s the very thing that bothers me the most: the un-expressionless faces of the cashiers. They look sad. They wear name badges, yet if you say their name, they look at you as if you’re some kind of freak. One time, one of them scolded me because I was emptying my cart too quickly. She told me to “slow down there Missy…there’s no rush.” But there was a rush; I was in the express lane, and I was in a hurry to get out of there.
My oldest son was shocked when he heard me say I dreaded to go to Wal Mart. “We got out sleds at Wal Mart! Nobody else had them!” He’s right. Perhaps I’m just too harsh on that store that give people so many jobs, with benefits.
Now that I’ve spent so much time on this Wal-Mart issue, I’m out of Wifi, so I’ll save my packing tips for tomorrow.
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Last time we were at Wal-Mart, one of my kids nearly got plowed over by a mammothly obese person in one of those electric scooters and the person had SEEN THEM! YIKES!
Haven’t met a person yet that ENJOYS Wal-Mart. We just seem beholden at times and over the barrel.
Just the way they like it?
Yeah, I agree, our city fought for years to keep Wal Mart out, many people here still refuse to shop there. It is a sad place, but you know when I needed bathing suits for swimming lessons Wal Mart had suits for $20, everywhere else they were $60 - what are you going to do?
We used Wal Mart for birth control for years, one trip to Wal Mart on a Saturday morning was all we need to just wait one more year. LOL
yep, Wal-Mart stinks, but sometimes it’s necessary. Especially when everything is getting so expensive.
I think WalMart contributes to the American disease of expecting everything to be cheap, and not figuring out why people don’t have enough money in the first place.
People at pretty much any big chain these days are looking zombified. Except maybe book stores.
I am anti Wal-Mart for many reasons, but the fact that they are the only retailer to move into our county for TWENTY YEARS after a major flood… well, they softened my heart a tad. I still dislike shopping there, but because of them, people around here can keep their tax dollars where they live. They also provided countless jobs (with benefits, as you mentioned) on a bus route to people who otherwise would have been on welfare.
Do I buy anything without reading the label? NO. Do the cashiers roll their eyes when I hand them my canvas bags from home? YES. Do I smile anyway? YES. Do I vigorously wash my hands when I leave? YES. Do I try to find a babysitter so my kids won’t have to set foot in the door? YES.
LOL!!!!! ME TOO!!!! Sadly, Walmart is THE only store in town that has Rice Milk - my lifeline since I have allergies. I buy 4 cartons at a time so I don’t have to go back often.
PS I left a comment the other day on your fireworks post but it must be lost in the net somewhere - anyway, you look SO PRETTY!
[...] know I’m crazy for any tip I can find that will minimize my trips to Wal-mart at the lake. My kids love fresh spinach, bananas, organs and sweet potatoes. However, they barely [...]
[...] the few days ahead of the trip making batches and batches of provisions with the sole purpose of avoiding a trip to Wal Mart for as long as humanly possible. Some of these “batches” include hummus, and black bean dip [...]