Why I Hate Supermarkets.
Okay, sure. Places like Walmart are really convenient, have a mind-boggling variety of merchandise to choose from, and are generally pretty easy to navigate through. Except when you’re having a shitty day.
You walk in with something to return, and immediately you’re tackled by a 75 year old man who wants to inquire as to what you’re doing with a bag in your hand, and asks to see your receipt. Because you know, lots of people steal. On their way in to the store. Anyways, after you’ve been cleared by the top-notch security system, you proceed to customer service. There will inevitably be a line wrapping around the corner, and only one person working the returns till, despite your local Walmart having a staggering number of actual employees. The one running the register couldn’t be less enthusiastic to be doing her job, but who can really blame her for that one. This woman may also have a light beard, a weight problem, and a heavy gait.
You stand in line for about 20 minutes, or a similar ludicrous time frame for a store with this many employees, before relegating the task of returning your item to “when it’s less crowded.” Just as you walk away, the line magically dissipates, and for a moment you’re fooled into thinking the universe gave you a break on this one. Except when you go to walk back to the till, 8 people come OUT OF THE WALLS and snatch that opportunity right out of your clenched fists. “Oh well, I’ll come back at midnight.”
Then you proceed to navigate through the big-beyond-all-sense retail store, (Our Walmart is a Super Walmart, which really just means the same amount of merchandise as a normal Walmart but spaced out into 6 football fields.) and then you realize that the two things you’ve come in for are at opposite ends of the goddamn stadium. So, you pick up one of your awkwardly packaged items (heavy things never seem to have handles, and in your rushed panic at being attacked at the door you forgot to get a cart or a basket) and proceed to make the sojourn to the other end of the store. You complete this arduous trip, and then head up to the registers to purchase your items and to end the awful experience.
At first glance, you see one of those fancy self-checkouts, and you think “well, golly, this is so convenient and much quicker than going through a regular line!” Don’t fall for it. You’ll have to decipher a complex panel of hieroglyphics in order to look up the UPC code for your awkwardly packaged produce item, and if you don’t hurry and bag it right away, the system freezes and proceeds to yell at you for not bagging it. Because that’s required apparently. I guess the price of wanting to do something quickly and fuss-free is being verbally badgered by a machine. You’re also mildly irritated at having mastered complex back end website code (well, if you’re me at least) but you can’t seem to crack this simple piece of electronic fuckery.
So, after you’ve stood there for about 5 minutes waiting for the machine to allow you to hit the “skip bagging” button, a hulking brute of an underpaid female employee meanders on over to you and asks you if you need any help. NO, LURCH, I DO NOT IN FACT NEED YOUR HELP. AN HOUR AGO? SURE. NOW? NOT SO MUCH.
You finally come through that little endeavor, angry but relatively unscathed. Guess who is waiting by the doors to lunge at you a second time? Yep, that’s right. The top-notch 75 year old security system. He questions you as to why you didn’t return the item you came in with, and you resist the urge to break his hip. Or give him a swift roundhouse kick to the face. Either/or. This is why I hate supermarkets. And I didn’t even go into the hoards of white trash and running, screaming children you have to swim through in order to make it out of the store alive. It’s experiences like these that make you sympathize with the idea of homicide.
I’d delve into a lengthy treatise about why none of us should shop at Walmart to begin with, with the outsourcing, underpaid foreign laborers, and the sterile homogenized robotic-personless world we live in because of it, but I just don’t have the energy.