Bad bad bad- Against my better judgement

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

After my dialysis Ivy insisted we go to Walmart.
I said “No no no, we really don’t wanna do that.”
But she kept on. It’ll be fun, she said. You’ll like it, she said.

I knew better. I had trepidation in my little non-joyful heart. But I agreed. Let’s go.

Gah!!!
Why do these people. Those people not shop earlier for gifts.

Stuff was thrown and out of place everywhere. Bananas were on the floor. Some smashed. Rolled or walked over.

The bread aisle was thick with people grabbing bread. Seems Walmart won’t be open til Tuesday after Christmas. Doesn’t Christmas close down stores every Christmas. I doubt one day without bread will kill you. And you’re gonna have leftovers. Jeez people.

I won’t even describe the Alcohol aisle. Arkansas doesn’t have alcohol for sell on Sunday either. These people were desperados about the Natty Light and Budweiser. Crazy.

But that’s not even my chief complaint.
I’m pushing the buggy. Ivy is extremely slow walking in stores. She stops alot. So I’m patient (I swear, never said a word to her, she couldn’t have hurried if she wanted to).

I’m vaguely uncomfortable but trying to be nonchalant about it.

And… here comes Big Bertha(I know judge-y).
Big bleached hair. Dragon nails. Loud, Ugly Christmas sweater. And to top off her outfit a jingly bell bracelet. Nice touch lady.
She singles me out of, I don’t know, a hundred buggy pushers and proceeds to tell me I’m on the wrong side of the aisle. She shrieks(really), “Don’t you know how to drive, Miss Thang!” Those words, exactly.
I’m the nicest person. I don’t confront. I don’t fight. But my color came up and I breathed deep.
Ivy said “Damn, some people are just so rude!”

She got between me and Bertha. Like I was gonna fight. Come on Ivy. You know better.

All I could manage to squeak out was, “We are not driving. This isn’t a road and where are we supposed to go?”

Big Bertha stomped off in her nasty platform shoes that she shouldn’t have been wearing after Labor Day.

When did Walmart hire traffic police? (Dressed in holiday mode)
That’s my question.

2

We pick up our groceries weekly around the back; works just fine. I hope I never have to set foot in a Walmart again.

3

I bought nothing.
I was thinking a few bananas wouldn’t be amiss. But big Nope on that.
Ivy bought some junk. Not much.

4

Much out of character for me I had reason to visit a Wal*Mart today at around noon. My coffeemaker died this morning and we have out of town guests arriving tomorrow. No time to trust a delivery, gotta be cash and carry. I did spend a few minutes online at walmart.com & target.com to see what products they stock. Those two stores are across the street from each other here, so I wanted to be ready for both. Fearing the worst of locust-picked-over shelves 3 days before XMas I wanted to be ready as ready could be.

Loins girded, off I went. Wal*Mart’s parking lot was busy, but not totally jammed. A favorable omen; perhaps this’ll be easy. Hah, foolish Florida Man! Entered through the garden store. Which, despite the fact it’s perpetually BBQ, patio, and garden season here in south FL, is the seasonal makeshift big toys section. Still had a decent collection of big toys on the shelves.

There are 3 registers there. One of which had a clerk. Which register, singular, had an unruly line of 20 heavily laden carts snaking amongst the toys and blocking access to the store itself. I shoved through that and into the store.

As I passed that line I overheard several conversations about how self-checkout had a line of 30 people each with overloaded carts, and most of the manned checkstands were not. The few that did hav a cashier had lines to the back of the building. So as bad as it was here, these folks thought themselves the smart ones picking this “short” line. Hmmm - so much for easy.

Once in the store, lotta people looking harried and People-of-Walmart-ish. Waaay too many PJs & crocs. Not a good look. Lotta full carts too.

Easily found a clerk (yaay) and asked where small appliances like coffeemakers was. Her English was limited but she pointed the right way and 4 aisles later I had Eureka.

They had many kinds but only one brand/model of what I wanted, a 5-cup drip. The website had about 6 makes/models of that size. Oh well. This wasn’t the one I preferred, and the checkout process seemed daunting if those folks lined up in the garden center were to be believed. Ugh. At least they had about a dozen of these coffeemakers, so I could set off for Target and if I came up empty handed there I could (reluctantly) return here with guaranteed success.

Off to Target.

Parking lot busy. Go into the store. Busy, but none of the frenzy of PJs and POWMs. All the checkstands have cashiers, and about 5 people with only handbaskets are waiting to use the 6 self-checkout stations.

Get back to the coffeemaker aisle and they have a much better selection in general, but only the same single 5-cup model as Wal*Mart had. But for $5 less, which is a big discount when it’s only a $25 item to begin with. So I grabbed the box, walked to the front, waited about 30 seconds then was directed to a self-checkout, paid with my Target card in my phone for an extra 5% off, and was gone for less than $20 total with tax.

Same product for less money in vastly better surroundings. What’s not to like about Target? I very rarely even enter a Wal*Mart, and this is why.

It has probably been 3 years sine I last bought something at a Wal*Mart. My new wife likes some of their housewares and gets something there every month or so. Not I.

I’m certainly used to stores in different parts of the suburban metroblob attracting different clienteles. But these two stores were directly facing each other on opposite sides of a big boulevard. Not even a city limit separating them. Same geographic catchment area almost exactly. POWM are just amazing.

5

Alas, No Target here abouts. Walmart is it.

6

Wow. I never heard of a Walmart being that bad. I’ve seen them be busy, with a lot of stuff out, and a few things put in the wrong places (including the occasional abandoned cart). But never has it been trashy on the floors. And I’ve never been confronted by anyone.

Most of the time people would ask me for help, thinking I worked there, since I tended to hang out in the electronics department while waiting on others to finish. But that’s quite long ago.

7

Our local Walmart is a frightful mess. Workers just don’t give a crap. It’s all there is.

The next town over is the same.

I figured it’s the only game in town. So this is the problem. Dollar stores just have so much.

South Arkansas is known for mouthy ass people, on a good day. Add some stress and peeps lose their shit.

8

You hide it well. Ouch, ouch, quit kicking me!! :crazy_face: :grin:

9

Hey, I try to be good.

I wanted to punch Big Bertha in the throat. I know my limits, tho’ :blush:

10

If you’d brought your spatula, you could’ve cleaned up on free bananas!

11

Somehow this reminds me of Black Friday in downtown Manhattan. Full-contact Olympic bargain hunting at Macy’s. Women ready to claw each other’s eyes out over the last Le Creuset.

12

That’s the reason I never ventured out to a black Friday event.
Ol’ beck don’t stomach these things very well.

13

My wife went to Walmart yesterday to pick up some stuff for her father. She went to the holiday section looking for a box of Whitman Sampler candy. Found the Christmas stuff has been compressed from 6 to 3 aisles and 2 aisles of Valentines candy is already on the shelf. Found her a box of Whitman candy with the Valentines stuff, she came home happy.

14

Oh, Yay!! Another Holiday. :heart:

15

I share your disdain for Walmart and its denizens. I very rarely go in there, and when I do it’s generally for a specific commodity item, just as in your example, and I get the hell out as fast as possible. But let it be said that Walmart’s success isn’t just luck or coincidence – they’re actually managed pretty well in a very competitive environment, even if the end result is not to my taste or yours. The ambiance in a typical Walmart is one of a disarray of cheap junk and no staff to help with anything, but that means low overhead and higher profits, and the regulars seem fine with it.

Target, for all its success in the US, is a great counterexample here in Canuckstan. A few years ago, Target made a big-time attempt to enter the Canadian market. They hired 17,000 employees and opened 133 stores practically overnight. It was evident in less than a year that the venture was an abysmal failure, and in less than two years they had closed up everything and gone home, with billions in losses.

The articles below itemize some of their mistakes. The schadenfreude aspect that they don’t mention is that experts in the Canadian retail marketplace advised them, both publicly and privately, that it was not the same market space as the American one and they were doing a lot of things wrong. Target executives took the position that they were a gigantic and hugely successful American retailer and they were not about to listen to a bunch of poutine-eating Caesar-swilling Canucks try to tell them how to run a retail business. The whole thing collapsed within a year with such catastrophic finality that it’s the subject of case studies in business schools.

Meanwhile Walmart has been successfully operating here for decades, and is opening more new stores all the time.

16

Merry Christmas, Beck!

17

Yeah. The Target Canada disaster is legendary. Something about building out all those stores and forgetting to build up a matching infrastructure to supply them. So they were promptly emptied and not refillable.

It all sounds too incompetent to have not been an inside job to scuttle the project for some internal C-suite political reason. Or so some insider could pick up the wreckage for pennies on the shareholder’s dollar and make a private killing. The latter never came to pass, so my bet’s on the former.

18

Thx. Merry Xmas to you as well!!:blush:

19

The diametric opposite to Walmart – a place where I actually enjoy shopping – is “the Bay”, or more formally, the Hudson’s Bay Company. Besides being the oldest company in Canada, having been founded in 1670 under a Royal Charter issued by King Charles II as a fur-trading business, it has the distinction of being the last surviving old-school department store – and not just surviving, but thriving. It owes its success to establishing itself as a uniquely upscale department store. I feel rich just wandering around in their luxurious ambiance. It’s addictive. I once bought some expensive fluffy hand towels because their trim would be colour-coordinated with the downstairs powder room, something I normally wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about, but there’s something about soft music, strategically placed lighting, and being surrounded by gleaming marble that puts one in a buying state of mind!

And sometimes you can actually buy things there at reasonable prices, sometimes even on sale. Not always, though. I was there once looking for a non-stick crepe pan, because I had burned the one I had. They had one, and it looked quite nice, too. It ought to be – it was over $200! I ended up getting one from Ikea for $10.

20

How hard was it to put together?