Walmart is a soul sucking whore.

We used to shop at Walmart when Shawn worked as manager for a call center. His hours were from 4 pm until 12:30 am. He was usually in the door at 1am, and while it was super odd hours—it was when we had super, when we watched shows we’d recorded earlier. We had our ‘evenings,’ when most of the world was dead asleep or just getting up to start their day.

When he got his job working at a bank, all of that changed. He had to be up to be able to get to work at 8:30am and home about 6:30pm. It almost goes without saying that these past ten months have been quite an adjustment. Shawn’s doing well, honestly, it’s me that’s still having issues.

I miss a few things about staying up late. That’s the chance to catch a lot of my online friends from all over the world who seem to be able sign on just when I should be going to bed, catching television shows that I might not see during the day, (no, not porn. I AM connected to the internet, after all.) and the sort of quiet that the night brings without the harsh glare of day.

But I don’t miss the shopping at Walmart.

We’ve been shopping during the day at Publix. Sure, it’s a franchise, but it’s presented as a small time grocery store, and I have never had an issue with Publix. The people that work there have often gone above and beyond what I expect in grocery stores—then again, I was used to shopping at Walmart.

Walmart sucks every little iota of happiness out of my very being. From the moment I get out of the car and struggle through the parking lot filled with women yelling at their spouses into cell phones, to fighting to get into the door behind the slow-assed family busy thinking the world’s going to slow down for them—I begin to fill with hate and dread.

We went to Walmart tonight because Sunday is Shawn’s day off and we needed groceries. A mistake that will haunt me for several moons. Gaining entrance into the bloated consumer paradise called Walmart was much as I described it above. As we crossed the threshold from sanity to the realm of insane, the harsh, florescent lights blinding me—I was immediately bombarded by the noise of the checkouts. (All of them full and right by the doors of course.) The Walmart greeter was a young sloe-eyed man that watched us enter with all the enthusiasm I imagine a roach would watch our feet pass by his dark little domain. When I offered him a hesitant smile, all I got in return was a quirk of the brow and a half-smirk that seemed to mock me for, oh, I dunno, being amicable.

We quickly grabbed a cart and went on our way as I was beginning to sense foreboding already. Shawn wandered off toward the deli to get sandwich meats for his lunch this week, and I took the cart to go pick up the rest of the groceries. (Deli’s are notoriously slow where we are, I can usually get our shopping done by the time they’ve cut our meat and cheese.)

As I was wondering about, there were several differences between Walmart and shopping at Publix that stood out for me. All the people in the Walmart store simply looked…deflated. Everywhere I peeked about there was hard beady little eyes and tense, shut tight mouths. A mother fed up with her child tearing a scarf from it’s hands and balling it up angrily into her purse—a gaggle of children running past me, screaming about candy and a very tired, pregnant mother listlessly telling them to stop knowing that they wouldn’t listen to her anyway. In the poultry aisle, a husband and wife spent the entire time arguing over the fact that he said told her he liked thigh meat, and well, she’d obviously over heard incorrectly.

Wheeling my cart down the canned foods to grab some canned mexi-corn to add to my special burrito mix—there was an old man dully standing by himself near the beans. He had watery eyes and thick glasses and for some reason I wanted to place a wife beside him, but she wasn’t there, obviously.

People walked fast and did their best not to meet me eye to eye, while in Publix, I’ve been known to make an offhand comment to Shawn and actually get someone to respond to it—or make a joke and have people laugh. Down these aisles, I feel like if I would I’d just get stared at or mothers would pull their children from me.

The floors were filthy here and there. There was a particularly interesting splatter stain in the coffee aisle when I went to pick up the no-name chocolate creamer for my coffee. It looked like a spill of some sort that, instead of being cleaned up, was left to congeal. And then several customers just kept running over it with feet or cart, with no one caring.

Things on shelves looked as if they had exploded or a pack of rabid humans had gone by to fuck everything up and leave in that cartoon ball-of-dust-and-arms-and-legs fashion. Everyone I encountered wearing the obvious blue vest or shirt looked weary, heavy-lidded and simply devoid of any human pleasantry what-so-ever.

And I remembered that this is pretty much how it’s always been. That it hadn’t changed.

It made Publix shine in comparison. There’s a manager that works at Public that knows Shawn by name. We went in one day for a few pieces of papaya. What we were confronted with was the whole thing, and it was pretty damn large; we would have wasted it. Just as we were going to put it down one of the girls that was working produce must have overhead us, because she offered to take the whole papaya and cut a few slices of it for us. We were so impressed, really, that we wrote up something positive for her and gave it to the manager.

He’s never forgotten Shawn’s name since then.

The aisles are always spotless, the floor has never been messy, there’s never a messy shelf or exploded produce that looked like a riot for carrots had come and gone. When Shawn goes in to pick up things without me, they ask him where I am. When we go together, the service is always awesome, even the people shopping there seem brighter, more colorful and certainly far more pleasant.

Don’t get me wrong. As middle to low class as we are, we love Walmart for offering us cheap, we really do. We know they’re selling their soul to the devil to do it, and we’re grateful to be able to go to stores like it to get nice things at affordable prices, but god damn, the environment in which they’re doing it in makes me want to forgo the chance at cheap just to save my sanity.

I think I’d rather stick to shopping at Publix and pay that extra cent or two on my toothpaste than brave the horde at Walmart anymore than once or twice a year or during extreme emergencies from now on.

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