Confessions Of A Retail Cynic

Okay. If you've been paying attention, you know how I feel about Wal-Mart. One might describe my relationship with that particular retailer as equal parts love and hate, but here lately, I am (sort of) sorry to admit, there is more hate on my part than love. Or if not hate, then at the very least, unmitigated ambivalence of the most profound variety. Wal-Mart remains oblivious to me in any case; we may even be breaking up soon. Allow me to explain.

If anyone reading this shops at Wal-Mart, they should immediately know to what I am referring when I say that the Wal-Mart folks have a real problem keeping enough personnel on hand to ensure that a sufficient number of checkout lanes remain open at any given time to deal with the multitude of customers wishing and hoping for speedy checkout. In fact, "speedy checkout" is a concept with which the good people at Wal-Mart seem to be wholly unfamiliar, if they are not actually out-and-out opposed to it. Speedy checkout is in fact so rare an occurrence at Wal-Mart that I would be tempted to put it on a par with the likelihood of Johnny Depp joining me for breakfast in the morning. To be perfectly concise, I am probably twice more likely to find diamonds pouring out of my Cornflakes box while sitting across from Johnny on the French Riviera tomorrow morning, than I am to experience anything approaching speedy checkout at Wal-Mart. Let's face it: if you were looking for an appropriate synonym for Wal-Mart, "efficient" would be among the last to spring to mind.

You feel the undeniable pull of forces beyond your control drawing you to the Wal-Mart StuporCenter. Cupboards all over your house are bare, so reluctantly you obey. You hock a few valuables so you can afford the trip. You drive over there; you apply starch to your upper lip; you park; you go inside. You grab a 200-square-foot sticky-handled cart with a creaky, wobbly wheel. You paw through the assortment of belongings pooled in your handbag until you locate your shopping list, which consists of anywhere from ten to seventy-five items. You make the split-second decision whether to start in health and beauty aids or the produce department, resisting the impulse to go straight to the posters and ogle Johnny Depp. You begin trolling the cramped aisles, marking items off the paper as you plunk them in your basket. When you've been there about a half hour and the floor of your cart is littered with eighty dollars' worth of everything from dental floss to lightbulbs, it's time to sashay over to the grocery side and begin foraging for something your family can eat.

Later, another half hour to forty-five minutes of your life irretrievably gone, you consult your list one last time while deftly dodging massive flatbed thingies bulging with boxes of merchandise that the "employees" insist on placing strategically in the aisles so as to block your access to the very items you wish to pluck from the shelves and BUY. You give up and head for the checkout lanes. As you round the corner and begin your final approach, your eyes drift upward, up in the atmosphere above the registers, to the white plastic numbered rectangular boxes that conceal -- presumably -- an electrical socket and a lightbulb. What you are looking for is one ... ONE ... white plastic rectangle that is actually illuminated, indicating that an "employee" beneath it stands ready to process your order. You begin praying that, against all odds, this transaction will be completed before the start of the next calendar day. It looks good; after all, you arrived on the premises before six in the evening! It makes sense to plan ahead.

What you see as with bated breath you scan 225 potential checkout lanes for one that might be open is that, in fact, TWO are! Your options are doubled! That is, if you don't count the lanes that are there for the convenience of the solitary customer who comes to the Wal-Mart StuporCenter in any given week and buys fewer than ten things, or the "self checkout" lanes that are available for those who don't mind adding insult to injury by actually doing Wal-Mart's work for them and paying for the privilege! I would not be one of those people. I won't go near a self-checkout lane; it's a matter of principle. I would rather wait with my heaped and groaning cart in one of the two available lanes behind six to eight other patrons with heaped and groaning carts, than do Wal-Mart's work for them. But while I wait I have time to reflect upon the strange reality that, as actively as Wal-Mart courts your patronage, when it comes right down to it they are in no real hurry to actually take your money out of your hand. If you figure that out, please send an email and 'splain it to me, 'k?

What prompted this rant is a commercial that Wal-Mart began airing on television in the last week or two. Maybe you've seen it. At least thirty neatly-dressed and smiling Wal-Mart "cashiers" are depicted standing beneath the white plastic rectangles at their registers, flicking the lights on and off to the tune of "Ring, Christmas Bells." The white plastic rectangles are flickering as merrily as if, instead of housing lightbulbs that rarely if ever see any action, they contained happy little hearts just singing away at the prospect of marking the spot where a loyal Wal-Mart customer might reach retail nirvana in the form of finally realizing the elusive dream of speedy checkout.

But before the viewer goes all cynical and judges this commercial to be a mere dramatization (NO!) with little if any basis in fact, the voiceover person hastens to specify that more lanes will be open to make it easier for us to accomplish our Christmas shopping. Oh, I see ... eleven months out of the year it is perfectly acceptable for us to grow old while waiting in line to hand over our dearly-earned cash to the disgruntled cashier manning whichever of the two open lanes we chose to languish in. But this one month -- the largest month of the year for retailers everywhere and certainly a month of extra merriment for Wal-Mart -- they will bite the bullet and open a few more lanes. But I'll bet you a bowl of diamond-studded Cornflakes that no matter how early or how late I shop at Wal-Mart, or how often I go or how long I stay, I'll never see a light above a register flickering for any other reason than that the line is dead in the water ... and that will be the line I'm in. Because for us retail cynics, the line always forms at Wal-Mart.

Comments

[Nicole]

That is too funny. You are hilarious. I love Walmart..it's the place to be esp. when you are bored but I never thought of the self-checkout as doing their job (I guess I figured I could bag and scan quicker than those who work there lol)...and the holiday extra lines are hilarious...that does seem to happen but that's the Christmas spirit allowing them to do so..haha..

[Jenny]

Christmas spirit ... you mean the spirit of filthy lucre ... LOL!