Wal-Mart
Every week or sometimes every other week, I go to Wal-Mart for the restocking of my above ground compound. I usually make a list before I go. You know the usual. Evil Lettuce. Malicious Pasta. Some cold hearted frozen pizzas. I then take this list to the store and try my best to get in and out quickly.
These trips usually start off with me in a good mood. I, generally speaking, enjoy shopping. I see it as an adventure in which, I never know what I’ll find. This is extremely optimistic on my part. Week to week, not much changes at Wal-Mart. The same things I couldn’t find last week, I still won’t be able to find this week. But, nonetheless, I go with a happy attitude.
So, I head out, list in hand. (Always, shop with a list. It saves money, it saves gas and it saves time. You’d be mad to not go with one.) I usually manage to find a good spot out front. I like to park kind of close to the shopping cart return spaces. Just close enough so that I can make a swift escape after shopping but not so close that my car becomes dented from the other careless shoppers.
Once inside, I grab my cart and go. I try to evaluate my carts quickly but efficiently. No sense in spending too much time sorting through carts. I could chart a time spent picking up carts versus satisfaction with cart over the time you spend there, but I’m not that deparate to waste my time. The sweet spot is to find a cart that works and just go for it. Spending too much time shopping is a good way to go mad. I usually approach my shopping in a back to front fashion. Going down (or not) each aisle as fast as I can. If possible, I arrange my shopping list to align with this row sequence. Going back for an item is a sign to me that my planning had some flaws in it.
Speaking of going mad… Wal-Mart has perfected some method to make their shoppers go mad. When I step into a Wally World, I can feel my soul getting sucked out of my body. It wouldn’t surprise me if their store was powered by some device that sucks any decent feelings out of their customers and converts it to electricity.
The decor of any specific Wal-Mart is interchangeable with the decor of any other Wal-Mart. And it consists of a mix of half ass, tasteless blue and as many box displays from their vendors as humanly possible to set up. Wal-Mart has no taste, and no style.
This is fairly sad. Out of most companies that I can name off the top of my head, Wal-Mart has the least taste. They even top Microsoft in my list of bad offenders. Which apparently they can get away with. It’s only the smaller competitors to these giants that seem to think taste matters (eg. Target and Apple). I leave their stores feeling like any sense of creativity and life has fled me. I often take a break after shopping to recover.
This is usually why any time I go optimistically look forward to shopping, I always arm myself with tactics and tools that let me breeze in and out of there as fast as I can.
