A quick stop at Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart is a bane to humanity.
Laud its low prices and one-stop shopping all you want, but Wal-Mart represents all that is evil in the world.
The company treats its employees terribly, it puts mom and pop shops out of business wherever it goes and the lines are ridiculous.
It even takes advantage of old people.
Seriously, is there anything more sad than seeing a crouched over old man have his worth reduced to saying “hello” to people who ignore him as they walk through the door?
I’m part of the hippy journalist demographic, so I’m bothered by the above complaints. I have several friends who refuse to shop there.
Unfortunately, I cannot comply to that kind of dedicated activism.
For as much as I hate all the bullying that Wal-Mart performs, I am above all a writer intimately interested in humanity.
What’s that mean? I like watching the dregs of society interact with soccer moms.
Where else can you watch two people get into a fight in the lube section and creepy, bearded guys sort through an entire section of canned fruit to find the one’s the government hasn’t contaminated?
Nowhere, but karma’s a bitch and my days of finding pleasure in other people’s misery had to come back sometime.
That time was tonight.

I’ve been rationing shampoo for about three days, but tonight I played racquetball and needed the full treatment.
So I made a quick run to Wal-Mart for fingernail clippers, bread, peanut butter and some hair care products.
I’ve never had to buy nail clippers, and I completely underestimated the difficulty.
I thought foot care was the logical place to start. Apparently not.
Grooming tools? Nope, not there either.
So started a storewide journey in search of any sort of clipping apparatus.
At first I walked toward electronics in between the hardware and bathroom sections, thinking maybe the clippers could be found in some sort of overlap between the sections that I was not previously aware of.
The clippers were nowhere to be found, but seeing Kevin Costner’s mug in the $5 movie bin did spark my memory.
Bull Durham, the greatest sports movie of all time, celebrated its 20th anniversary last week, and I watched it about five times.
Costner is quite possibly the greatest sports actor of all time. Aside from playing the part of Crash Davis, he also brought sports lovers Field of Dreams and Tin Cup.
Tin Cup is the best golf movie of all time behind Caddyshack, and I’d meant to pick it up last week to make a Kevin Costner doubleheader.
So I started searching the bin. It’s amazing how what looks to be thousands of movies is really just five different titles mixed together.
Anyway, I couldn’t find Tin Cup, but I did see a copy of A Few Good Men. I was about to take it as a consolation prize when an old woman wheeled by and swiped it.
That’s when I sort of figured the night wasn’t going to go well.
I went and grabbed the food I needed, stubbed my tow getting out of the way of an employee pulling one of those giant carts and still couldn’t find the damn clippers.
At this point my 15-minute stop at Wal-Mart was in the area of 45 minutes.
Defeated and broken, I trudged back toward the movie section to wheel around to the personal care section for one last look for the nail clippers.
As I was passing the fabric section, I noticed a fat guy peering around a corner at ratty-haired woman in neon Hammer pants.
I saw him earlier, but I’d originally thought he was just into children’s paint sets. Turns out he was following this woman. Every time she wheeled down an aisle or moved to a different fabric, the dude would get up, run to a different spot and cautiously look at this woman around the corner.
I don’t know whether he was some sort of idiotic stalker, trying to play a joke on his wife, or a husband trying to catch his wife cheating on him with linens.
In any regard, I made a decision.
“Fuck it, I’m seeing this one out.”
I stopped, leaned up against my cart and started watching.
After a few minutes of observing the creepy hilarity, the guy noticed I was staring at him.
“What are you looking at?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re sort of distracting me.”
“Don’t stop on account of me. This is the best thing that’s happened to me all night. By all means, keep acting like a douche bag.”
He stopped and I continued on my search.
I was getting ready to give up when I finally found the damn clippers in the personal care section, approximately 10 feet from where I started the night.
I was relieved to find the clippers, but I’d like to have a few words with the wise-ass who decided to put them next to the finger nail polish.
As I was trying to determine which kind to get – who knew there was more than one? – I inevitably ran into someone I knew.
I discovered that it’s not easy trying to explain yourself to a woman who thinks you’re trying to decide whether “Berry Charming” purple nail polish matches your eyes and skin tone.
Sure, I could have gone with the truth, but I wasn’t so sure the “My finger nails are long and I’ve been putting off cutting them for two days” would have appealed to her.
Besides, she thought the shade was good for me.
At that point I just wanted to go home.
I wheeled my cart to the checkout stands and played a little game I like to call “which clerk looks the least mentally handicapped?”
After finding a clerk that didn’t look strung out and/or challenged, I got in line. Turns out it was the 10 items or less express lane.
I didn’t have much in my cart, so I was pretty confident I’d be OK, but I wasn’t so thrilled with the old woman with a cart filled to the balls trying to check out.
Sure, it’s entirely plausible the women just didn’t read the sign. She was old, after all.
But her glasses were thicker than bullet proof glass, so I have a feeling she just didn’t give a shit.
After about five minutes of arguing, she finally went to another aisle and I was seconds away from heading home.
“Sir, you have 11 items.”
I was not amused.
Turns out she was serious.
Usually I would say something cheeky and cute and convince her to ring me up. I couldn’t muster any words on this particular occasion, however, because I was too busy trying to remember whether choking a store clerk is a felony or misdemeanor.
She finally checked me out after about a 10 second stare-off and sent me off with a warning about checking my cart next time.
Whatever.
I was just happy to get to my car and back to the apartment.
Oh, and it turns out that in my rush to defend my masculinity, I accidentally grabbed cuticle trimmers instead of nail clippers.
They look pretty much the same, except cuticle trimmers are inverted and only have half a blade.
It took me 15 minutes to cut my nails.
Damn you Wal-Mart.