I had to spend about an hour and a half at Sam’s Club once while I was getting new tires put on my car. But they had food samples, so it wasn’t that bad.
Also, back in my completely awkward socially inept high school days, I once stopped at Wal-mart while I was on a date (which, at that time, was maybe the 2nd date I’d ever been on in my life). Needless to say, I didn’t get a second date with that particular lady.
Just a couple Sundays ago my wife and I needed to do some shopping and eat breakfast. We went to Wal Mart and had some coffee ( I had cappucino!), sat for maybe 20 minutes, made our purchases and went on home. Does that count as hanging out?
Nah, my first time inside a Wal-Mart was yesterday afternoon. I even bought something there, and helped my wheelchair-bound friend pay for $60.72 worth of HER purchases.
Should I feel dirty now?
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I hate Wal Mart for most of the same reasons stated here. Mainly because of the inconvenience of it.
When I was a teen and Wal Mart first came to town, and we all got our licenses, we did go there in the middle of the night and do stuff like throw snack cakes against the building and fill up shopping baskets full of dreadfully unrelated stuff (baby shoes, ammunition, low-fat chips, hair dye) and leave them in the aisles.
We even called ourselves the “WalMartKlan” and had some kind of hand symbol.
That was fun for about 3 weeks.
Is there anywhere else to hang out besides Wal-Mart?
I’ve shopped there, although I’ve never actually ‘hung out,’ unless you consider eating lunch and waiting for a set of 1-hour photos to be done ‘hanging out.’
Depends on what you have touched, and how much of your body touched it. You should be washing your hands during flu season, IIRC; but that’s true even in upscale boutiques (sp??).
The glare.
The mutants.
The mullets.
All the cheap plastic stuff from China.
And all the people in camouflage.
No thanks Wal-mart, I’ll just wait to experience all that in hell!
“Now, did you say you were going to Target? Cool, may I have a ride?”
Some folks actually got rounded up for jury duty just for shopping at Wal-Mart.
Check out the news story here.
My SIL has been known to take her little neice and nephew to the “zoo” that has somehow been labled “Petsmart”.
It’s a lot closer and cheaper than that other zoo.
Though I don’t hang out at Wal-Mart, I do shop there. And I’ve noticed something interesting about Wal-Mart that, before now, I haven’t had the opportunity to share.
I was raised in a small town (about 10K) in Kansas. We had a Wal-Mart. (When I was quite young, we also had a TG&Y which later became an Alco, but that’s beside the point.) Anyway, we were poor, which meant that any new clothes we got came from Wal-Mart. That, to put it lightly, was awful. The clothes were absolutely horrible, at least to someone my age.
Then, when I was 20, I moved to Kansas City. I slowly began to realize that it was entirely possible to walk into a Wal-Mart and walk out with a cute, fashionable outfit, all while wheeling your cart unencumbered through the aisles. Not Prada, no, not even the Gap, but still–something you could walk around in without feeling freaky. Finally, I thought, Wal-Mart is coming around.
Then, about five years ago when my sister got married, I went back to the ol’ hometown for the wedding. Somehow, I ended up needing a pair of shoes and a skirt (not for the wedding itself, for a dinner or something), so off we headed to Wal-Mart.
It was badly layed out, inefficient, and inconvenient. AND the clothes and shoes available for sale were atrocious. I can’t really say that they were out of style, because I’m fairly sure they’d never actually been in style.
My point here is that the Wal-Mart experience can differ widely from small town to larger metro area, and from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart.
*Thanks, BTW, for the terminology, Guin. I’ve often wished I had a name for the death-defying Rave-frozen vertical pouf of bangs that we all wore back then.
Up until about 8 years ago there wasn’t around here. Now there’s 3 casinos less than an hour’s drive away.
After working at a casino for some years now I’ve come to realize that there are a lot of lonely people who can’t stand coming home to an empty house after work. They come to the casino or hang out at Wal-Mart just for the human contact or to people watch. You might be surprised at how full our casino is on your traditional “family” holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas. Yup, lots of lonely people with either no family or ostracized from their family.
Oh, I took a shower almost immediately after I got home on Friday afternoon.
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