OH MY! Please, everyone, forgive me this very politically incorrect rant.
The Walmart by my house is easily the worst place on earth. In fact, it might actually qualify as one of the lower rings in Dante's Inferno. I have been in this store twice and BOTH times have vowed never to return - evidently absence makes the heart grow forgetful. There is no excuse. Well, OK, I was doing it for my son. Typically we go to Targhetto for all of our stuff because I find it much more palatable, but the neighbors got light up jump ropes from HELLmart and he really, really, really, really wanted one. Since he has been pretty good about trying to go potty in the toilet (yes, he is 3 and a half, shut up) and he was due for his "reward" I caved. God Almighty. I did not know that today was the first day of school (OK, I did because the neighbor with the light up jump rope started 3rd grade today so I should have clued in) and that everyone in the ghetto would be raiding the school supply aisle in Hellmart tonight at 8:30. Don't start with me about having my kids out at 8:30-the boy napped until after 6 so I think he was fine. The girl, well, if her behavior was any indication - it WAS past her bedtime but the way I see it, she just made the people around us pay for being idiots with their eardrums. Checkmate, suckas. But I digress. Here's the 411.
Once upon a time, my lovely husband and I went to Walmart for a toy. It was a toy that was given to our beloved son who thought it was the best toy ever created. It was a toy that blows little balls out the top for parents to chase all over the house and becomes the repository for all things small enough to fit in the hole on top - causing parents no end of frustration and many exclaimations of "How the hell did he get that in there?" "That isn't coming out anytime soon," "Can you get me a screwdriver?" and "Honey, baseballs are too heavy for this toy, what happened to all the other balls? Did you flush them?" Anyhoo, we decided to share the joy with other parents of a child the same age as ours (sorry Veronica) and found it on sale at Walmart. Hallelujah. A great toy and it's on sale. Well, we paid. Oh yes, we paid. After waiting in line for what seemed like hours (because every minute spent in that place is like an hour in a POW camp for me) we were finally at the front of the line to pay for awesome toy. Our checker was about 11 months pregnant, wearing a dirty, stained and ill-fitting wife-beater undershirt beneath her Walmart vesty thing. Amid the incessant shoplifter sirens from the front door, she was whining to her supervisor as we stood there - whiny child, progressively irate mommy and increasingly placating daddy - that she had been PUKING right and left and that while she just came back from her lunch, she really needed to go home - again. Said supervisor, who also was ignoring customers waiting as patiently as possible to shell out dollars for a toy that was rapidly diminishing in awesomeness, basically told Trailer Tracy that she wouldn't be paid for her lunch and breaks if she didn't complete her shift and that they were short staffed so she would have to suck it up and continue to work. Believe me, I have been pregnant so I have a LOT of empathy for nausea. But this girl stunk like an ashtray, was sucking on a Big Gulp Coke and had a pack of cigarettes in her back pocket, therefore, any sympathy she could have gotten from me was absent. Since she didn't get her way, she decided to do her job with as little haste as possible while bitching to her co-worker two aisles down. The absolute kicker for me was when she took the receipt off of the register and proceeded to wipe her nose with the back of her hand before handing it to me...as I stood there with my mouth hanging open. We escaped and I vowed never to darken that door again.
Fast forward to more than a year later. Hellmart visit, part deux. As we enter the parking lot, I get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Probably terror because this is no ordinary parking lot. It is a ghetto parking lot with lots of cameras to videotape all the cars parked illegally, idling in the fire lane, peeling out and speeding hell bent for a close open spot, honking at others who aren't fast enough getting their wares stowed in the trunk and the inevitable begging "ran out of gas can you help" crackhead accosting pedestrians. There are unrestrained children flailing about within the cars and unsupervised children ducking in and out between other cars just missing becoming parking lot paste by a virtual hairsbreadth. I am having trouble breathing by now but we decide that the light up jump rope and the smile that will be bestowed upon us will mitigate the horror of entering this place so we buck up and troop in. Listen, I have to say that it is a rare and joyous occasion when I actually pick a basket with 4 functioning wheels. We were not so lucky this visit. Strike one. No luck in finding the light up jump rope, either. Strike two. Now our backs are against the wall (although we were smart enough not to mention that we were there specifically for the jump rope just in case - yes we learn from our mistakes) and we have to improvise and allow the boy child to pick his reward from the other offerings on the shelves of the store. The same shelves where the price stickers are curiously absent. Naturally, the child who takes after his parents picks a die cast John Deere tractor despite our best efforts to coax him into the plastic airplanes and sailboats. I am already picturing that thing through the sliding glass door, by the way. Of course, I have no idea how much this thing costs because there are no discernible price stickers on the shelves that even remotely correspond with the items surrounding them. LITTLE PONY $2.99 - no, no pony here. CRE BR SDT $6.59. HUH? So I have to find a price scanner to ensure that little mister moneysucker hasn't picked the sole estate guaranteed collectible in the whole place, while leaving daddy, boy AND screeching girl in a toy aisle. I should have insisted they accompany me but I did not. By the time I had found the price ($11.59 *sigh*) and returned, the boy child had surprisingly changed his mind and had found a SET of John Deere vehicles that he absolutely could not bear to part with. Again, no price tag (should this be strike three?) I find that there is a sign for a price checker much closer than the first one I discovered (in the paint section where everything is clearly marked) so I head that direction, figuring the less time the fam is given to linger in the toy aisle, the less likely I will return to find the kid with an actual John Deere that he must have in exchange for not sitting in his own sh...you get the idea. I am standing directly under the scanner sign before I realize that it has been forcibly removed from the post. Seriously, shoplifting has reached it's apex here. I am now muttering under my breath as I trudge back down to the paint section again. Thankfully, the set ends up being no more than the first John Deere he picked out so I rush back to find the boy with the original John Deere tractor in his hot little hands and force him to make a decision between the two. An hour later (exaggeration -but see my note above about the time warp in Hellmart) he picks and we are on our way to the checkout with 5 items. Yes, we are suckers. Along the way my stoic husband says "what the hell is going on up there?" referring to the enormous swarm of people blocking the main aisle to the undermanned check outs. Yep, school supplies. Not in AN aisle, in bins in the MAIN aisle. Reminds me of city planning. Anyway, we wait as everyone tries to swim upriver through this life crushing crowd and finally bail out and zig zag our way to the front through the tampon aisle with screaming toddler girl causing people to plug their ears and curse at us in Spanish. I do a quick reconnaissance and decide that the "SPEEDY CHECKOUT 10 Items or Less" is our best bet. Again, it is a rare and joyous occasion when I pick a line or lane that actually moves faster than the lines or lanes around it. Again, not so lucky. Is this strike twelve yet? Conventional wisdom will grant that while it's the longest line, since everyone has less than ten items, it should go faster than the checkouts with three or four people whose baskets are overflowing, right? Nope. Of all the signs in this damn store, the ONLY one that is not duplicated in Spanish is the "SPEEDY CHECKOUT" one. But I SPEAK Spanish so I know that 10 is 10 in both. Evidently the people at the front of our line thought it meant 10 children. I have to admit they followed the rules (unlike the three people directly in front of us with 12-17 items in their carts. I counted. Aloud.) because all ten kids had ten items and a wad of ones in their hands. And they rotated off the same basket. For the love of GOD, just ring the whole damn basket up at once instead of allowing this farce of abiding by the rules of the SPEEDY CHECKOUT. Unbelievable. By this point, the boy is deliberately provoking the girl into escalating hysterics and the daddy is doing his best to make mouthy mommy laugh in order to avoid a confrontation with a banger in the middle of ghetto Hellmart. The people in line in front and back of us are grumbling and widening the space between us but since they can't understand my stream of attitude, they have no idea that I am insulting their ancestors and intelligence. I feel a bit bad about that in hindsight. Ah well, the kids couldn't hear it over their whining match, so, c'est la vie. We finally check out after 15 minutes of waiting (no exaggeration so you KNOW how long it felt) and are hightailing it to freedom with the hordes of other shoppers bottlenecked at the escape route, uh, I mean automatic doors when, of course, the gentleman in front of us sets off the shoplifting sensor. Shocking. He does not have enough sense to back out of the way until security can check him out, though. Nope, he tries to put his stroller through two or three more times. The growing lines of natives are getting restless, and I am about ready to search his pockets myself when "security" comes to inspect his stroller. Security is a lady named Shirley who can't be more than 5 feet tall or over, say, eighty-nine. I manage to pull our basket around them in a blatant cut of the line and burst out into the crosswalk where, with my scowl, I visually dare any lowrider to hit me. It works because we make it to the car without incident - toss the kids into their carseats amid impatient honking and peel out of the parking lot, dodging lame 3 wheeled carts, packed cars and sprinting kids.
Never again. I swear it. NEVER again.
