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| - The express lane, 10 items or fewer, ground to a halt. There was an old grandpa with his cart filled to the top. Nowhere close to 10 items. It was at least 50. No one said anything.
I wouldn't say anything. There was a time years ago that you could call people on crap like that. Not anymore. They don't care. They'll just tell you to stick it where the sun don't shine.
Here's what they do now. They park their cart in a checkout line, then grab items from around the store. They don't stay with the cart. They run back to the cart and dump items in.
One time, I came up to a checkout line (not Wal-Mart) and found an abandoned cart with some groceries in it. I pushed it aside.
A guy came up and wanted to fight me. It was his cart. I was supposed to know about this new shopping technique. He ripped me a new one. I haven't been in a fight since grade school, so I had to let him curse me out. Radical new shopping strategies require brutality.
Back to Wal-Mart, I wonder why the checker didn't refuse to serve the old man with the full cart. Why did he feel entitled to special treatment?
There's too much of this going on in our culture. Everyone thinks they are special. The rules are for stupid chumps. Who is going to say anything? You could get knifed or shot.
It reminds me of a time I was riding a city bus (not in Vegas). The driver asked these teenagers to turn off their boombox. They ignored him. I guess he didn't look threatening in his seat. But when he pulled over and got up from his chair, their smartass smirks were gone. He was one tough hombre. He walked back and stood over the kids. "What did I say about that radio?" You could tell they were about to wet their pants.
Before Wal-Mart decided to build a "super" center here, this neighborhood was on its way to being yet another bad area in Las Vegas. A block away, a McDonalds closed. There was a bookstore called BookStar, a huge drugstore called Drug Emporium, catalog store Best Products, a Lucky grocery store, and a Kenny Rogers Roaster shop. They all gave up and fled, turning the area into a retail ghost town.
After Wal-Mart and Lowe's came in, new shops sprang up on the site of the demolished Red Rock movie theater. CVS built a branch where a bank once stood. A 99 cent store moved into the abandoned Lucky store.The neighborhood still is nothing great, but Wal-Mart can take a little credit for arresting the slide into slumdom.
When I first visited this Wal-Mart a couple of years ago, the grocery section was packed. You had to enter the main aisle like a freeway. People zoomed their carts at full speed. You had to push your way in.
Traffic has dropped off nicely. In December there was a nice old lady giving away samples of eggnog. I took a quart of pumpkin spice. I wanted to buy a bottle of whiskey to go with it. Buying liquor at Wal-Mart is a hassle, however. The liquor is kept in an enclosed area. You have to find an employee to let you in.
Then the employee stands and watches you, making sure you don't stuff a bottle down your pants.
Wal-Mart is supposed to be Bargain Central, but not for booze. Prices are higher than the grocery store. While the employee watched impatiently, I scanned the shelves for some cheap whiskey. You don't need anything special to mix with eggnog.
I didn't buy anything. It was all 3-5 dollars more than the grocery store. I wasted the poor employee's precious time. On the way home, I picked up a bottle of cheap whiskey at Food4Less.
I checked the lemon supply: they were 38 cents each recently. That's a pretty good price. There's a bubble in the lemon market lately.
I would have awarded this Wal-Mart 3 or 4 stars except for the express lane policy. Why have an express lane if you're not going to kick people out when they're over the limit? The store isn't that bad. Sometimes you get friendly, helpful employees.
The main problem with Wal-Mart is they sell a lot of cheap junk that's not even worth the low price you pay. They represent what America has become: cheap goods and exploited workers. There was the dot com bubble, the real estate bubble, the credit bubble, and the commodities bubble.
Now there's a cheap goods bubble. People think nothing of trampling to death a fellow human (just a Wal-Mart employee--no great loss) to grab that cheap electronic item made by slaves in China.
Useless question of the century: Did you find everything OK? It's just something they ask to sound friendly. You aren't expected to actually report a problem finding an item. It's not like they will actually drop what they are doing and track something down for you.
For fun, say you couldn't find something. "I couldn't find the Hebrew National Salami." "Do you have any ball peen hammers?" They'll just give a blank look, dumbfounded that someone actually takes the question literally.
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