A Tirade Against Wal-Mart
I went to Wal-mart yesterday.
(Pardon me while I go chew the wallpaper off for a few minutes.)
OK, I’m back. Sorry. I just had to vent.
I wanted to buy a Nikon digital camera, and the only camera store remaining in our town has very little inventory these days. I also needed some envelopes, and our stationery store went out of business two years ago. We have no children’s clothing store, and only one left for adults. No toy store. Our only remaining shoe store is Payless. Our only bookstore is closing in March.
All we have left is three hardware stores (with old and dusty stock) and a couple of lumber stores.
Oh, we have some good garden centers. And a couple of fabulous quilting stores. Wal-mart is mounting a full-scale attack against them with a huge, generic garden section that they replace once a year with an enormous $1-a-yard cloth sale.
But gardeners and quilters know they get what they pay for.
Hey! America! Did you hear that? Hello? Haven’t we learned that lesson already? Let me repeat it, so you get it this time. I’ll type really, really s-l-o-w-l-y, so you can understand.
You get what you pay for!
You go to Wal-mart for these ridiculously cheap deals, and that’s what you get. Ridiculously cheap stuff and absolutely no customer service.
Wal-mart didn’t have the camera I wanted, of course. They only carry one Nikon, several steps down from the professional model I wanted. Photographers also know what you get...(repeat with me, kids: WHAT YOU PAY FOR).
I wandered around. I wanted a little rack I could hang inside my kitchen cabinet to put a wet dishrag on. I couldn’t find it. I ran into a lady in the same aisles; she was looking for a razor to cut lint from sweaters that had pilled. She couldn’t find it. I ran into her at least six times. We both had a lost expression on our face. Probably 25 employees in their pretty blue jackets walked past us and didn’t notice us wandering, lost, with an increasingly stressed look on our faces.
Why, after all, would they notice customers in distress? That’s not what they’re hired for. They’re hired to Stock Shelves! Or Bring In Carts! Or whatever it is they are doing while they roam the aisles not helping (or even noticing) the customers. Unless, of course, we get in their way, like the “Sales Associate” who cut me off in the aisle, making me wait while she crossed on a Mission of Much Importance.
Not that they are paid enough to bother with customers anyway. As children, they didn’t exactly say (stars in their eyes), “When I grow up, I want to work at Wal-mart!” No, they had to take this farking job because there aren’t any others left since Wal-mart (did I mention?) is running everybody else out of business.
I could drive 30 minutes to the nearest “city,” where at least they have a Target, I suppose. How is it that Target, for only a little more money, manages to offer considerably better goods? There isn’t stuff piled up in the aisles. You don’t have to wait for 20 minutes to check out. AND there are people. People who help you! Occasionally, they even offer, so you don’t have to ask (are you taking notes, Sam?).
In Wal-mart, on the other hand, you have to walk the quarter of a mile to the service desk where you wait for 20 minutes because there’s a line (of course), and there’s only one person on the service desk. And the “customer service” desk has to call someone out because, of course, the person working the desk knows nothing about…um…goods? We sell goods?
I tried to buy propane one time. I had to stand in line at the “customer service” desk. They paged someone. They told me to wait outside. I waited outside. For 20 minutes. I went back in. They said they had to page someone. I said, “You already did that.” They said, “Let us do it again. Someone will be right out” (ever notice it’s always “someone” at Wal-mart? Never Kevin, or the manager, or the department head; nope, it’s always “Can someone please come to the front for a carryout? Can someone meet a customer at the propane tanks? Can someone tell me where the fark my butthole is so I can wipe?”). Anyway, I went back outside. I waited 30 minutes. Finally, I went back in, asked for the manager and removed a couple of square inches of his skin. He told me to go outside and wait, but this time, in only 10 minutes…add it up, folks. It equals 60. One full farking hour waiting outside, in the rain, to fill up a propane tank because my previous supplier has gone out of business…in only 10 minutes, “someone” had come out to fill my tank.
The last five times* I’ve gone to Wal-mart, I had to wait at the checkout stand for 20 minutes (or longer) because every single register had a long line. Wal-mart doesn’t ever advertise, “You’ll never wait longer than x minutes!” Wal-mart doesn’t advertise, “If more than x people are in line, we’ll open another register!”
Oh, no! What does Wal-mart do to fix the problem? Wal-mart adds Self Check-Out. “Fast! Convenient! Check yourself out! No waiting!”
Ha! No waiting. As long as you don’t have a 3-year-old and a 7-year-old who think scanning objects is great fun.
As long as you don’t make a mistake…like “forgetting” to put an item in the bag. Say the “item” in question is a Kitkat bar. Say you’ve bought it for said 3-year-old and 7-year-old to keep them quiet while the senior citizen in front of you tries to figure out the Fast! Convenient! Self Check-out!
In the old days, when there was a real, live, breathing person (sometimes with a smile) on the other side of the checkout counter, that person would take the candy from the child, scan it, and hand it right back. But no! Now that it’s Self Check-out, the “person” on the other side of the counter is a computer, and all this totally emotionless mechanical brain knows is that said candy bar weighs 0.025 ounces, so if 0.025 ounces aren’t put in the bag, then it rings, “Wait! You need assistance! You have to have permission to skip bagging.” So you wait. You wait a long time. Oh, there is a blue coat in the area, but she’s too busy because everybody’s having problems.
So you wait. And you wait. And you wait. And the computer brain in charge continues to say, “Please wait for assistance. You don’t have permission to skip bagging.”
The assistance never shows, and eventually the computer resets the message and lets you finish scanning your items. You can, however, only see three items at once, so it isn’t until you have paid and gotten a receipt that you realize that during the excitement, your children learned how to scan items. You’ve double-paid for several items.
But, wait! There’s hope yet. There is, after all, a person, a live person, in the Self Check-Out area. You know this because the computer told you to wait for her. She has a machine. She has the kind of machine where she can simply cancel out an item if she makes a mistake-something she rarely does because she doesn’t have toddlers on her side of the checkout counter.
Unfortunately, said live person can’t help you with her big, fancy machine. No, she has to send you past the arcade games to the customer service desk. Remember “customer service?” Remember the long line?
I had to ask myself if $4.27 was worth yet another 20-minute Wal-mart line. But you know…it’s MY flipping $4.27, and they already had $38.14 of MINE, for which I received primarily an acid stomach and an increased heart rate. I wasn’t going to donate more.
For what I “saved,” I would have happily gone to a hardware store, a camera store, a stationery store and a clothing store (if we had those stores still), where I could have dealt with real, live people who treated me like a person too. Rather than dealing with a machine that treated me like an idiot (“Hey, Stupid! You aren’t smart enough to decide what goes in the cart. You HAVE to put everything in the bag unless you have permission from Somebody Intelligent! Someone in a Blue Coat!”).
I got my $4.27 returned to my debit card, dragged my children a third time across the entrance to the video arcade, and once again, I was treated to the ultimate delight: the sweet sound of my children whining for something they’ve been Pavloved into wanting.
In our SUPERcenter, if you go in one door, you have to pass McDonalds. You go in the other, you go past the games. You can only smuggle your children in safely via the Garden Center or the Automotive Shop-adding another 1/4 mile to your walk.
Of course, it’s no accident that they put these kid magnets right next to the main entrances, so that every parent has to drag kicking and screaming children past them every time.
They know we’ll have to listen to our children whine the entire time we’re in the store. “Mommy, can we go to McDonalds?” “Mommy, I want a hamburger!” Mommy, get me some French fries!” “Mommy, I want games.” “Mommy, can I ride the safari truck?” “Can I? Can I, please?”
They know that after a two-hour trip and a 1/2-mile hike one way through the parking lot and SUPERcenter to buy one spool of thread, we are going to break down when our children whine. It’s yet another way to get more money from us invisibly while still duping us into thinking we are saving money with their RollBack! Prices!
I have thought a lot about Wal-mart today, and about its people-unfriendly policies. And I have decided that Sam Walton was a subversive with a hidden agenda: drive all the intelligent, thinking people into the cities. Eventually, nobody will be left in the vast American countryside but blindly obedient consumers who vote straight-ticket Republican on every ballot, including federal judges and school boards, and put their hands over their heart and get teary-eyed from patriotism anytime anybody waves the Old Blue Wal-mart flag.
And that’s when Walton planned to lay siege to the cities. Of course, he’s passed on (we’ll pause for a moment while shoppers everywhere take a moment of silence, and I grind my teeth)…but I’ll bet somewhere in a safe is a top-secret, Code Blue, classified document that outlines exactly how to cut the supply lines to America’s great cities. Eventually, even the educated sophisticates will be forced to accept RollBack Prices!
And the country will be inherited by inbred imbeciles who think Wal-mart is a great place to shop and NASCAR is an Olympic sport.*
At least I don’t buy my groceries there. We do…knock on wood…still have two good supermarkets in town, and I will shop at them until Wal-mart drives them (and me) weeping into the city where I will stock up on toilet paper, bottled water and capers in preparation for the upcoming siege.
Edit: after reading this, Mars came up to me and said, “You know what’s ironic? The last time we went to Wal-mart, you said…”
“I said what? I would never have said I liked it!”
“Well, no. But you said it wasn’t too bad!”
Hmmm. The most damning evidence he has to weaken these arguments is that one time, after a 10 p.m. trip to Wal-mart with him and without any children. . .I said it “wasn’t too bad?” I rest my case.
*In the interest of fairness and full disclosure, I must admit to some hyperbole for effect in this entry. For instance, it wasn’t the last five times literally that I had to wait in the check-out line for 20 minutes. Actually, the last time was really quick. It was the two times before that and (skipping one trip) the three times before that. And my children don't really whine the entire time we're in the store--only for the 10 minutes right before and after we pass one of the kid magnets. And the inbred imbeciles don’t actually believe that NASCAR is an Olympic sport-just that it should be.
(Pardon me while I go chew the wallpaper off for a few minutes.)
OK, I’m back. Sorry. I just had to vent.
I wanted to buy a Nikon digital camera, and the only camera store remaining in our town has very little inventory these days. I also needed some envelopes, and our stationery store went out of business two years ago. We have no children’s clothing store, and only one left for adults. No toy store. Our only remaining shoe store is Payless. Our only bookstore is closing in March.
All we have left is three hardware stores (with old and dusty stock) and a couple of lumber stores.
Oh, we have some good garden centers. And a couple of fabulous quilting stores. Wal-mart is mounting a full-scale attack against them with a huge, generic garden section that they replace once a year with an enormous $1-a-yard cloth sale.
But gardeners and quilters know they get what they pay for.
Hey! America! Did you hear that? Hello? Haven’t we learned that lesson already? Let me repeat it, so you get it this time. I’ll type really, really s-l-o-w-l-y, so you can understand.
You get what you pay for!
You go to Wal-mart for these ridiculously cheap deals, and that’s what you get. Ridiculously cheap stuff and absolutely no customer service.
Wal-mart didn’t have the camera I wanted, of course. They only carry one Nikon, several steps down from the professional model I wanted. Photographers also know what you get...(repeat with me, kids: WHAT YOU PAY FOR).
I wandered around. I wanted a little rack I could hang inside my kitchen cabinet to put a wet dishrag on. I couldn’t find it. I ran into a lady in the same aisles; she was looking for a razor to cut lint from sweaters that had pilled. She couldn’t find it. I ran into her at least six times. We both had a lost expression on our face. Probably 25 employees in their pretty blue jackets walked past us and didn’t notice us wandering, lost, with an increasingly stressed look on our faces.
Why, after all, would they notice customers in distress? That’s not what they’re hired for. They’re hired to Stock Shelves! Or Bring In Carts! Or whatever it is they are doing while they roam the aisles not helping (or even noticing) the customers. Unless, of course, we get in their way, like the “Sales Associate” who cut me off in the aisle, making me wait while she crossed on a Mission of Much Importance.
Not that they are paid enough to bother with customers anyway. As children, they didn’t exactly say (stars in their eyes), “When I grow up, I want to work at Wal-mart!” No, they had to take this farking job because there aren’t any others left since Wal-mart (did I mention?) is running everybody else out of business.
I could drive 30 minutes to the nearest “city,” where at least they have a Target, I suppose. How is it that Target, for only a little more money, manages to offer considerably better goods? There isn’t stuff piled up in the aisles. You don’t have to wait for 20 minutes to check out. AND there are people. People who help you! Occasionally, they even offer, so you don’t have to ask (are you taking notes, Sam?).
In Wal-mart, on the other hand, you have to walk the quarter of a mile to the service desk where you wait for 20 minutes because there’s a line (of course), and there’s only one person on the service desk. And the “customer service” desk has to call someone out because, of course, the person working the desk knows nothing about…um…goods? We sell goods?
I tried to buy propane one time. I had to stand in line at the “customer service” desk. They paged someone. They told me to wait outside. I waited outside. For 20 minutes. I went back in. They said they had to page someone. I said, “You already did that.” They said, “Let us do it again. Someone will be right out” (ever notice it’s always “someone” at Wal-mart? Never Kevin, or the manager, or the department head; nope, it’s always “Can someone please come to the front for a carryout? Can someone meet a customer at the propane tanks? Can someone tell me where the fark my butthole is so I can wipe?”). Anyway, I went back outside. I waited 30 minutes. Finally, I went back in, asked for the manager and removed a couple of square inches of his skin. He told me to go outside and wait, but this time, in only 10 minutes…add it up, folks. It equals 60. One full farking hour waiting outside, in the rain, to fill up a propane tank because my previous supplier has gone out of business…in only 10 minutes, “someone” had come out to fill my tank.
The last five times* I’ve gone to Wal-mart, I had to wait at the checkout stand for 20 minutes (or longer) because every single register had a long line. Wal-mart doesn’t ever advertise, “You’ll never wait longer than x minutes!” Wal-mart doesn’t advertise, “If more than x people are in line, we’ll open another register!”
Oh, no! What does Wal-mart do to fix the problem? Wal-mart adds Self Check-Out. “Fast! Convenient! Check yourself out! No waiting!”
Ha! No waiting. As long as you don’t have a 3-year-old and a 7-year-old who think scanning objects is great fun.
As long as you don’t make a mistake…like “forgetting” to put an item in the bag. Say the “item” in question is a Kitkat bar. Say you’ve bought it for said 3-year-old and 7-year-old to keep them quiet while the senior citizen in front of you tries to figure out the Fast! Convenient! Self Check-out!
In the old days, when there was a real, live, breathing person (sometimes with a smile) on the other side of the checkout counter, that person would take the candy from the child, scan it, and hand it right back. But no! Now that it’s Self Check-out, the “person” on the other side of the counter is a computer, and all this totally emotionless mechanical brain knows is that said candy bar weighs 0.025 ounces, so if 0.025 ounces aren’t put in the bag, then it rings, “Wait! You need assistance! You have to have permission to skip bagging.” So you wait. You wait a long time. Oh, there is a blue coat in the area, but she’s too busy because everybody’s having problems.
So you wait. And you wait. And you wait. And the computer brain in charge continues to say, “Please wait for assistance. You don’t have permission to skip bagging.”
The assistance never shows, and eventually the computer resets the message and lets you finish scanning your items. You can, however, only see three items at once, so it isn’t until you have paid and gotten a receipt that you realize that during the excitement, your children learned how to scan items. You’ve double-paid for several items.
But, wait! There’s hope yet. There is, after all, a person, a live person, in the Self Check-Out area. You know this because the computer told you to wait for her. She has a machine. She has the kind of machine where she can simply cancel out an item if she makes a mistake-something she rarely does because she doesn’t have toddlers on her side of the checkout counter.
Unfortunately, said live person can’t help you with her big, fancy machine. No, she has to send you past the arcade games to the customer service desk. Remember “customer service?” Remember the long line?
I had to ask myself if $4.27 was worth yet another 20-minute Wal-mart line. But you know…it’s MY flipping $4.27, and they already had $38.14 of MINE, for which I received primarily an acid stomach and an increased heart rate. I wasn’t going to donate more.
For what I “saved,” I would have happily gone to a hardware store, a camera store, a stationery store and a clothing store (if we had those stores still), where I could have dealt with real, live people who treated me like a person too. Rather than dealing with a machine that treated me like an idiot (“Hey, Stupid! You aren’t smart enough to decide what goes in the cart. You HAVE to put everything in the bag unless you have permission from Somebody Intelligent! Someone in a Blue Coat!”).
I got my $4.27 returned to my debit card, dragged my children a third time across the entrance to the video arcade, and once again, I was treated to the ultimate delight: the sweet sound of my children whining for something they’ve been Pavloved into wanting.
In our SUPERcenter, if you go in one door, you have to pass McDonalds. You go in the other, you go past the games. You can only smuggle your children in safely via the Garden Center or the Automotive Shop-adding another 1/4 mile to your walk.
Of course, it’s no accident that they put these kid magnets right next to the main entrances, so that every parent has to drag kicking and screaming children past them every time.
They know we’ll have to listen to our children whine the entire time we’re in the store. “Mommy, can we go to McDonalds?” “Mommy, I want a hamburger!” Mommy, get me some French fries!” “Mommy, I want games.” “Mommy, can I ride the safari truck?” “Can I? Can I, please?”
They know that after a two-hour trip and a 1/2-mile hike one way through the parking lot and SUPERcenter to buy one spool of thread, we are going to break down when our children whine. It’s yet another way to get more money from us invisibly while still duping us into thinking we are saving money with their RollBack! Prices!
I have thought a lot about Wal-mart today, and about its people-unfriendly policies. And I have decided that Sam Walton was a subversive with a hidden agenda: drive all the intelligent, thinking people into the cities. Eventually, nobody will be left in the vast American countryside but blindly obedient consumers who vote straight-ticket Republican on every ballot, including federal judges and school boards, and put their hands over their heart and get teary-eyed from patriotism anytime anybody waves the Old Blue Wal-mart flag.
And that’s when Walton planned to lay siege to the cities. Of course, he’s passed on (we’ll pause for a moment while shoppers everywhere take a moment of silence, and I grind my teeth)…but I’ll bet somewhere in a safe is a top-secret, Code Blue, classified document that outlines exactly how to cut the supply lines to America’s great cities. Eventually, even the educated sophisticates will be forced to accept RollBack Prices!
And the country will be inherited by inbred imbeciles who think Wal-mart is a great place to shop and NASCAR is an Olympic sport.*
At least I don’t buy my groceries there. We do…knock on wood…still have two good supermarkets in town, and I will shop at them until Wal-mart drives them (and me) weeping into the city where I will stock up on toilet paper, bottled water and capers in preparation for the upcoming siege.
Edit: after reading this, Mars came up to me and said, “You know what’s ironic? The last time we went to Wal-mart, you said…”
“I said what? I would never have said I liked it!”
“Well, no. But you said it wasn’t too bad!”
Hmmm. The most damning evidence he has to weaken these arguments is that one time, after a 10 p.m. trip to Wal-mart with him and without any children. . .I said it “wasn’t too bad?” I rest my case.
*In the interest of fairness and full disclosure, I must admit to some hyperbole for effect in this entry. For instance, it wasn’t the last five times literally that I had to wait in the check-out line for 20 minutes. Actually, the last time was really quick. It was the two times before that and (skipping one trip) the three times before that. And my children don't really whine the entire time we're in the store--only for the 10 minutes right before and after we pass one of the kid magnets. And the inbred imbeciles don’t actually believe that NASCAR is an Olympic sport-just that it should be.