Our Wal Mart is the only store open 24 hours (the grocery store closes at 1, Target at 10, Aldi at 8, all of this is within 2 miles of Wal Mart) so I usually only find myself there late at night when I need something quick. It’s a little closer than the grocery store.
My impression of Wal Mart, since I’m only there after say 10 PM, is that it’s full of working families who take their kids grocery shopping at 10 PM, and their kids are very unhappy about this, so there are a lot of crying children at Wal Mart.
I’m not 100% sure why my Wal Mart has a lot of families shopping after 10 PM. I am assuming it’s because that’s when the parent(s) are off work and they are either on their way home after picking up the kids from wherever the kids go while they work, and that’s why the kids are in tow, or this is literally their only family together time due to work schedules, and there’s no one to watch the kids while they shop.
There’s definitely a staffing problem at my Wal Mart too. After a certain time (maybe 9, maybe earlier) they go down to 2 registers but the people don’t stop coming to shop. So we all have to stand in line for a really long time. The nighttime shopping kids don’t like this one bit.
Oh also, speaking of kids, I more often than not run in to a group or two of teenagers who are being cool by spending some time hanging out at Wal Mart after dark. This is suburbia so they are not violent or menacing, they’re just annoying and walk around taking up extra space. And walk slowly. The other day they were racing motorized carts. Ha ha!
ETA: I don’t begrudge the families that are shopping together at 10 PM. I just notice them.
I go at most once a year, and one of the ones I go to is in the heart of Silicon Valley, so not a bad location - and the place is still soul-deadening. Horrible environment, shelves out of order, lots of registers with only a few open. I’ll take Target or Costco any day.
Add to that their immoral resistance to helping to pay for fire alarms in factories, their bribery of Mexican officials, etc., etc., and you have a corporate cesspool. I’m lucky enough to not have to shop there, so I won’t unless there is something very specific to get that no one else has.
Just the other day Celtling and I were headed home from a day at the pool. Our hair was a mess, and we had just thrown our sundresses over our swimsuits to head home. I suddenly realized I needed: a new SD card (for my camera), dog food, and laundry bleach. To top it all off, Celtling was just about to fall asleep in the back seat.
I turned into the WalMart parking lot, and proceeded across the parking lot in my swim shoes, with a black maxi-dressthrown over my bathing suit, and the child thrown over my shoulder. I’m sure the back of my dress was wet from sitting in my suit in the car.
And I didn’t give a flying farina, because I just needed what I needed before the child fell asleep. But I am currently afraid to look at the POWM website, because there’ every chance my photo may be there today.
The thing is, most of the people going there are in the process of heavy housekeeping or chore day. they are not dressed to impress. It’s rather like complaining about fashion choices at the laundromat.
How do you figure that? How would you even know what most people are doing before they go there? When I’ve gone, I see plenty of people who look like they’re out running errands, not mucking stalls or repainting their houses.
The reasons I hate WatMart have more to do with the fact that they continue to treat employees poorly and that the store near me is messy, kind of dirty, and impossible to navigate. The other shoppers don’t play much into my opinion, so it’s nothing to do with thinking I’m better than other people.
Here’s the thing- there are thousands of Wal-Marts all over the world, and likely millions of people visit these Wal-Marts at all hours of the day and night.
How many weirdos end up on the website? Not really that many, if you consider the sheer numbers we’re talking about. You could probably end up with a similar number of weirdly dressed kooks if you had people do the same thing at McDonalds or Target or any other national chain store.
All that being said, and Wal-Mart does seem to be a magnet for the sketchy low-income demographic- both white, black and hispanic. If you ever wanted to know what low income people wear and how they behave, go hang out at Wal Mart.
But for the most part, these people aren’t the ones on the website, just everyday customers who may seem kind of strange and foreign to the rest of us.
I certainly understand the ‘megastore’ principle and sure, we have BigW’s and KMarts here, but I have never found one to be dirty, disorganised or littered with the odd folk that Walmart is famous for, hence my OP. And I actually live in one of the most socially and economically disadvantaged suburbs in Victoria!
I believe this is the correct place for the following
Walmart, like your dollar stores, are going to attract folks from the poorest strata of the population. Folks who are overworked, overstressed, and don’t have the money to buy the best clothes, or to change them out if they don’t fit quite right anymore. The poorest segment of the population, in the States anyway, are also more likely overweight, with all the health and “style” problems that go along with that.
It also doesn’t help that many WalMarts operate on the principle that understaffed is correctly staffed. The stores are dirty and disorganized, which encourages people to treat it like a dump, and not give a crap if they are well groomed while going there.
It varies greatly from place to place. The Walmart near my current place is neither dirty nor disorganized. The worst thing about us that like other Walmarts there are never enough cashiers. I have been to ones that are much worse and they are usual in areas where you will find not stores which are any better.
Dirty and disorganized are hallmarks of poorly run stores, basically. And for all the stick WalMart takes for its corporate policies, they WILL see to it that their stores are clean, bright, and organised - or else. I’ve never hit a WalMart that was scuzzy, though I imagine there are some.
As far as odd folks, it’s down to the neighborhood, and confirmation bias, really. If one in a hundred of WalMart shoppers are…eccentric, then that adds up to 1.4 million potential honorees on the People of Wal-Mart website.
WalMart, like Mcdonalds and Disney, is a corporation that works toward the 99%. The experience will be acceptable, and the higher ups will maintain an iron hand to see to it that it will be so, no matter what, thus attracting the largest number of customers.
The thing is, I understand this quote. I lived in a smaller town (20,000) or so. Walmart was pretty much all there was, and this means that everyone shops there. Doctors, homeless people, lawyers, ditch diggers, the mayor, etc.
Since it was a smaller town, and everyone shopped there, you were probably going to see someone you know if you spend any amount of time there. Maybe your barber, someone from your church’s choir, maybe even your pastor. If you were a woman (men generally didn’t care), you need to make sure you look presentable.
Well, yeah. In rural areas where there is no other hang out, the WalMart serves the same role that the Dairy Queen used to. It’s here peeple meet up socially. Not so in Northern Virginia.
I won’t shop there I don’t care if I have to pay more somewhere else.
It’s nothing to do with being a snob, or how the other people dress.
The stores are hot (because as I have been told somebody in AZ controls the heating and AC), the lines are too long, and a lot of the stuff they sell is crap anyway. There’s a reason it’s so cheap.
What did it for me was when I wanted to buy a certain CD and I was told they didn’t carry it because one of the songs had the word bitch in the title. It goes against their moral sensibilities.
I’ve read in the past how a woman was fired from a walmart because old sam found out she was living with her bf instead of being married and how an female employee was sent home from a company picnic for ::gasp:: wearing a sleeveless dress. The SLUT!
It’s all fine and good to have moral sensibilities, but as an adult I don’t need other adults censoring my choice in music. That is fine though, I can take and spend my money elsewhere.
What I have a real problem with is walmart wanting to claim they can’t sell a certain CD because it goes against their Christian morals, however treating their employees like shit, locking them in warehouses overnight, stiffing them on overtime and benefits and all the other crap they do seems to fit in just fine with their Christian values.
Well, I think that makes them just a bunch of big hypocrites and if you are going to claim to have Christian values then you need to live up to and honor those values ALL THE TIME, not just when it suits you.
Their pick and choose attitude towards Christian values offends my moral sensibilities.
That is when I determined they would never get another penny of my money.
Got cites for all those? I have no doubt that Walmart gives its employees the least amount it can. It is a huge publicly traded corporation, just like the rest of them.
Speaking of Sam, he has been dead for more than 21 years. I think you might have to bury that hatchet sometime.
I’ve been surprised at how different the stores can be. They look the same on the outside, but the WalMart folks are pretty well tuned to their target demographic even at the single store level.
Simplifying a little, I live midway between “affluent burbs” and “lower bubba-ville”. Each has its own Walmart. When I’m looking for hunting or fishing equipment, lower bubbaville is the better choice by far. If I’m looking for more upscale (outdoorsy) things like backpacking meals, the affluent burb store is a far better choice. The stores are within 6 or 7 miles of each other, but have large differences in products.
I’d always wondered about that site or the meme, too. Everyone at the closest Walmart looks like a normal subsection of the population, except maybe more kids than usual. I found out from my cousin that some parents just drive their kid to Walmart and drop them off for a few hours to give them something to do out of the house.
I used to go to the Walmart near my dacha a couple hours outside of NYC. I stopped going because while the shopping part was fine, enjoyable even, the checkout part was reliably lousy (long lines on the few registers that were open ) and there was no effort by the store to ease the misery. Even the self checkout was backed up for when I just wanted to grab a few things. Forget it.
