Joe Lansdale posted:

"Walmart, I can't Quite You"

Once upon a time in our little town of Nacogdoches, arguably the oldest continuous settlement in Texas, there was no Walmart. There were numerous stores downtown and few outlander establishments where we bought our goods. Our first Walmart was little more than a glorified Kmart, just another place to shop. Then the old Walmart was replaced by a Walmart Superstore. As it went up, potential patrons like my wife and I drove by the ground where it was being built and stared out at the rising structure that was about to replace so many stores and businesses in our town. At that moment, we did not see it as good.

But lo and behold, it was built, and we came, and we bought, and I was wrong.

We needed a Walmart Superstore in our town. We just didn’t know it. It has become a focal point. A place where bored and thrifty shoppers can congregate and entertain themselves by seeing what’s new and who’s there with a kind of wonderful East Texas local yokelism reminiscent of a group trip to foreign tourist sites.

Laying it on the line, Walmart is not considered a prestigious place to buy clothes, quality jewelry or Paris fashions. If you’re looking for sexy underwear, maybe victoria’s Secret is a better place for you. There’s even a Web site that reveals shoppers at superstores in all their sometimes backwoods, broadass glory. The site’s secretive cameras focus on house shoe-shuffling women in muumuus all the colors of the rainbow (if the rainbow faded a bit and had some gravy stains on it). you’ll find huge, bearded men strapped snugly into overalls, and waddling patrons of both sexes in straining stretch pants, usually brown or gray (maybe that’s just the way I remember them).

Then there’s the rare bon vivant decked out in a cosmic, shimmering blue or green uniform that would shame a peacock, all of these stretch-pants regulars revealing way too much of their Grand Canyons, minus the donkey ride down (thank goodness), as they move off into the aisles searching for bargains.

There are gangs of overweight scooter riders, sometimes in corrective shoes that never touch the ground, whipping about with bags of open cookies in their laps, devouring as they shop, consuming enough calories to fuel an Olympic rowing team. Fact is, there’s something ominous about how the scooter riders congregate near the hot dog and ice cream aisles like motorcycle gangs, missing only the insignia on the leather jackets that read something like: WALMART ANGELS or BAD MOTOR SCOOTERS. They’re the kind of folks who look at you when you walk by as if, on a moment’s notice, they might snatch a can of potted meat and throw it at you because you’re ambulatory.

It’s easy to make fun of them because, dammit, they’re funny, and I’m ashamed that I think so. Missing teeth and plumber’s cracks are not a cause for celebration. Few of us wake up in the morning wishing we were overweight, underfinanced and unattractive with medical problems. But then, who is out there laughing at me? I’m not George Clooney material, either.

It seems the ones who make the most fun, like the ones who view the Walmart-hilarity Web site regularly, are small-minded, insecure turds who would not understand Mark Twain’s statement about there being “no humor in heaven,” meaning humor is primarily based on the misfortune of others. I can see the humor, too, when I’m in a mean mood. I’m not a saint, or I couldn’t write about Walmart’s clientele with an eye toward humor.

Let’s turn the dial the other way for a moment. Once, on a book tour in Los Angeles, I heard a welldressed man ragging about Walmart to the desk clerk in a hotel, as if this poor wage slave had nothing better to do then listen to this rear end-wipe ejaculate about the great unwashed. Well-dressed man was ragging while trying to bring the discussion to a higher ethical plane by talking about the cheap employment, foreign child labor and lack of benefits associated with these stores.

I got to say, I’m with Well-dressed man there. I’d rather not have my goods packed by children in diapers, foreign or otherwise. I’m all for folks being paid proper salaries, and given good insurance and better benefits, so that at the end of the day they can go home having earned more than enough to keep the gas from being turned off, and have more on the meal plan than a can of sardines, even if they are packed in springwater instead of soy oil.

Well-dressed man had one important thing to say. It was what motivated him the most. Walmart stores lead to the closing of downtowns. They do. No question about that. Not that this bastard had ever seen a small downtown, and the closest he’d been to Walmart was a scathing editorial in some newspaper somewhere. He looked at me and decided I should be brought into the conversation when all I wanted was to remind the clerk I needed a wake-up call. The man asked me what I thought about Walmart.

I asked if he had ever been in one. “Why, of course not,” he said. I asked him where he shopped. He told me.

They were expensive places. I told him, “you know, most of that stuff, except the stuff you don’t need, you can get cheaper at Walmart.” The clerk liked it. I liked it. I registered my wake-up call and went upstairs, left the authority on Walmart in the lobby, pissed off and pontificating.

If he had had heat vision, he would have burned me into a pile of ash and kicked it into the street.

Why am I defensive about Walmart? Let me tell you about the long-gone downtowns, my friends.

Before I do, I know you have some wonderful, cheerful, perhaps tearful, stories about the downtowns of your youth. Me too. I don’t want to hear them.

Let me tell you, the late downtowns in East Texas burgs were usually small stores run by locals. They generally priced things three times more than they were worth. Maybe they had to, but I don’t care. I don’t want to pay $30 for a hammer and a fistful of nails. If I wanted a banana, I had to go to another store. If I wanted to pick up a pair of shoes, another store.

The parking was minimal, and the choices were few.

If you worked, by the time you got off work, many of the stores were closed. Saturday, they might be open, but Sunday they were closed again. So for the working individual, the mother or father who had a kid wake up in the night with aching gums from teething, and you wanted something to make it all better, you had to wait until the next day. If you noted it was 7 p.m. and you were expecting dinner guests at 8 p.m., but forgot to buy hamburger for the meat loaf, you were, once again, screwed.

If you’re poor and barely making it, or even if your income is middle-of-the-road, it’s good to get what you need at slashed prices, anytime of the day, seven days a week, in a big, ugly, over-lit store that closes only on Christmas and half a day on Christmas Eve. If you forgot to get a gift card and a six pack of tall boys, you have to think, “To hell with downtown.” What we got now in our downtown are specialty stores that provide things we can’t get at Walmart, like maybe a stuffed deer head for that special place over the mantle. The stuff we really need, hell, it’s at Walmart.

Here’s something else. With Walmart in town, lots of people can be put to work, far more than downtown ever employed. Someone has to run a 24-hour store, check people out, sack groceries, push carts, place stock, work at the McDonald’s sequestered in the back. The workers have all skin colors, not something I saw a lot of downtown, except for immigrants unloading trucks. When I have a tummy ache from eating too many jalapeños late at night, I go down to our Walmart and buy Alka-Seltzer, run it through the computerized checkout, and I’m gone.

However, not before noticing that a large number of shoppers there look like those on that humiliating Web site, and a whole lot do not. Many are doctors and lawyers and teachers and pillars of our community, and a couple of guys out on probation.

As I catch my reflection in the automatic door on the way out, I notice one of those shoppers looks a lot like me. Am I on camera?

PS: The book racks at Walmart suck. Just being fair.

Reveilled posted:

This actually still seems a bit strange to me because in the UK, for example, where the tax is even across the whole country, the same chain can and does charge different prices for the same product in different parts of the country, often in different parts of the same city. Items generally are more expensive at the Tesco near my work than they are at the Tesco near my house, even though they're a 20 minute drive apart, because the Tesco near my work is in the town centre. And the Tesco in my town centre will be more expensive than a Tesco in the town centre of Paisley, but cheaper than a Tesco in the town centre of London. Tesco HQ sets the markup for each of these stores individually, transmits the prices to the stores electronically, who then print the price tags onsite.

Does that not happen in the US?

Haifisch posted:

The hot new YA dystopian movie, coming out next summer:

There are two classes. The outsiders transport things between various insider enclaves. The insiders rule from the comfort of their computer desks. One plucky teenage girl realizes revolution is needed, and strikes where it hurts most: takeout delivery.

Xaris posted:

We have four Safeways within a 2 mile radius, granted, 2 of those is because they just bought a small-grocery chain (adronicos) a few years ago but yeah, They haven't closed any yet but I can't imagine they're keeping all 4 busy, although the one I go to insanely loving busy almost all the time with like only ever 1 manned checkout open and 8 self-checkout machines of which 3/4ths are typically broken and a long line extending to the back of the store just to use a machine.

I loving hate Safeway though, what a scummy and evil company.

Rated PG-34 posted:

If you work a lovely retail job and don't steal from your workplace, you're stealing from yourself.

MiddleOne posted:

Neanderthals were arguably not even people, or at least that's what our ancestors must have been telling themselves as they murdered the poo poo out of them.



Fishmech is right though, this argument is stupid.

Baronjutter posted:

I don't think children should be exposed to marketing and it should in fact be a minor crime to attempt to advertise to children.

glowing-fish posted:

You are right, and 9 on Sundays.

Walmart is open 24 hours.

KingFisher posted:

Sears or JC Penney who dies first?

HEY NONG MAN posted:

Mrs Claus is a no good ho-ho-ho

PT6A posted:

Is there an equivalent in the US to Canadian Tire? They have a bunch of toys and stuff, but also other things which are useful. As much as they piss me off sometimes, there's a lot of stuff you can buy there if you need it.

fishmech posted:

I'm sorry what fancy dishes were the peasants of the Roman empire getting? Slaves of all sorts? Industrial Revolution England factory workers? The tribes of Australia in the resource poor areas?

Tons of people got along fine on bland food that would nevertheless be seen as rare foreign dishes not so far away.

Noctone posted:

I still see Kmarts occasionally in rural Colorado and Wyoming. And there's one in Maui, of all places.

DC Murderverse posted:

do you know if they're hiring for the division that goes around and pisses on the ashes of small businesses and empty big box stores? and if so do they offer benefits?

CheeseSpawn posted:

Someone else say Amazon?

Naked cap put up a piece reminding why if you're not working in AWS for Amazon, working at the warehouse/ whole foods basically sucks.

the black husserl posted:

This should be mandatory reading for Americans, it's one of the important things written in the past 20 years. And at the rate we're going with Amazon, it might be the most important thing written in a 100: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.

On hot days, they literally line up ambulances outside the warehouses because they know so many people will be collapsing with heatstroke.

fishmech posted:

A&P's parent WAS A&P, and they'd basically been hosed since 2010 when they first went under chapter 11 protection due to leveraging so much to buy out Pathmark just before the great recession (which itself hadn't been doing well in the first place).

Of course, A&P had been slowly fading since the 1960s, going through repeating cycles of attempting to keep up with competition by building new stores and financinang that by closing many more of their older smaller stores, etc.

Magic Hate Ball posted:

And hardcore Philip Glass fans.

Magic Hate Ball posted:

Growing up in California and living in Washington has absolutely spoiled me on being able to buy whatever I want, whenever I want to. The concept of separating liquor is so dumb, just sell it all in the same place. Who the gently caress cares, sell weed at a Circle K, we have bigger problems to deal with.

Caganer posted:

mastershakeman posted:

The great thing about discs is you can rent them from the library for free

boner confessor posted:

people who move to or live in the suburbs on purpose generally hate their neighbors and want as little as possible to do with them and messes with people who grow up in that environment