Wal-Mart Start

Made my first trip of 2014 to my local Wal-Mart yesterday morning, and like the items in my basket, the visit  was definitely a mixed bag.

First, the parking lot at ten a.m. was about as empty as you’d usually find it four in the morning.  I was able to park on the front row, midway between the door I was going in and the one I would be coming out.

The lack of a crowd – and very few little kids – made it easy to cruise the aisles, and I found some things I wasn’t actually looking for.  For example, I got Honey a package of crew socks that weren’t on the list, but which she had mentioned that she needed.

It would have been an ideal experience except that the folks that Wal-Mart had scheduled to work New Year’s morning were the employees at the bottom of the corporate pecking order – the slowest, dumbest and least cooperative people on their staff.  I almost said that they were operating with a skeleton crew, but I didn’t see anyone working that wasn’t seriously overweight. 

Granted, they might have resented having to work that early on New Year’s Day (or they may have just been hung over) but these people were a fine example of why Wal-Mart is justified in paying what the activists condemn as a sub-standard wage.

I (and three other shoppers just while I was standing there) discovered that they were completely sold out of dry black-eyed peas, a mandatory staple for New Year’s Day.  We already had a pot going at home, so I was not nearly as distressed as a couple of the women I saw.

On the other hand, they may have been out of peas, but they had a whole end-of-aisle display with hundreds of packages of 60 watt incandescent bulbs.  I stocked up on those.

This last may say more about me than it says about the store, but I’ve seen this before and it annoys the Hell out of me. 

There are two rows of  check-out stands at Wal-Mart.  The first row (the one they used to use most often) is designed for right-handed shoppers - as your bags come around on the lazy Susan, it is easy to retrieve them and put them in your cart.  The second row (which they used to use only for overflow) faces the opposite direction, which makes loading your stuff awkward and inefficient.

Yesterday, every check-out stand that was open was left-handed.