A Trip To Walmart

If you ever find yourself feeling overweight, unattractive, or lacking self-awareness or a fashion sense, take a trip to your local Walmart and you will soon feel better about yourself. You’ll feel worse about humanity, but better about yourself. Wearing your pajama bottoms to go shopping? Seriously? I take greater care dressing even when I’m staying at home, for fear my dog might judge me.

I no longer go to Walmart to shop so much as to observe the shoppers and merchandise in order to get insight into the country I now live in. It is while wandering around Walmart that I really appreciate just how far on the fringes of society I have become. The movies, the music, the food, and the clothing are all alien to me. It’s like walking around a toy store as a grown up: everything that was once out of reach is now affordable, but you wonder what you ever saw in all that cheap plastic crap.

I wonder what those making such merchandise on the other side of the world think about us. I wonder what they think about a people and a country that don’t make their own patriotic merchandise but rely on foreigners to provide. And there is plenty of patriotic merchandise on display, from clothing to paper plates and plastic cups, to actual American flags. Can a nation incapable of or unwilling to make its own flags long endure? What would Betsy Ross think if she were alive today?

The food aisles are a testament to American obesity. Our forefathers would not recognize anything on the racks as “food”. Those rugged explorers who founded this country knew how to live off the land, eating roots and berries in a pinch to survive. I can envision them starving to death if they became trapped in a Walmart for any length of time. God knows how the rest of us survive.

What is exactly “wholesome goodness”, anyhow? A bag of crackers advertised it was full of it but I could find no mention of it in the list of ingredients. I sometimes wonder about the people who are paid to create packaging like this. Does it feel good to go home after a day at work, knowing you’ve degraded speech and meaning to the point where the words “wholesome” and “goodness” have lost all their value? Is there some joy to be found in wasting your education in such a manner? I have to imagine it would be equivalent to getting paid to masturbate and that it would ultimately lead you feeling just as empty and cheap. “What did you do today?” “I made it seem fun and healthy for people to eat processed sugar and genetically modified food.” It has to be especially soul-crushing as these are the kind of jobs open to those who studied art and literature in college.

Have I mentioned the customers yet? If you ever want a totally immersive television viewing experience, pop in a zombie movie into the wall of display TVs there and you will feel like you are truly in the movie, as Walmartians shuffle past you in the electronics section. Scary.

Not all the food there is unhealthy. They had a bunch of grapefruit in the fruit and vegetable aisle. Funny, I remember grapefruit when it came in the yellow packaging. I believe it was called a rind. Now it comes in clear plastic. I don’t see why this was necessary. Nature was quite good at providing a protective cover, it’s been around forever and it’s 100% bio-degradable. Do we really need to involve plastic in every purchase we make?

It seems like people are going out of their way to create excess waste. I saw cases of water in plastic bottles, wrapped in plastic no less.

I brought my own reusable bag to the checkout, a fact the cashier ignored, as he started stuffing a plastic bag with my groceries. I told him I had my own bag and if it didn’t all fit, I’d carry it rather than use plastic. He asked, “Are you sure?” Like he was trying to save me from committing a grave error, from something I’d regret doing. It’s funny, when you try to do something to save the planet from being drowned in plastic, people look at you like there’s something wrong with you. If you’re not consuming diabetes-inducing foods in mass quantities, if you don’t have a nose ring or aren’t pawing at a smart phone, you’re viewed as suspect. If you don’t want to use the self-checkout because you don’t want to make people lose their jobs, the people who stand to lose their jobs make it seem like you’re inconveniencing them.

My trip to Walmart today has reminded me why it has been so long since the last one. But still I can’t remove myself from it all together. There is a realness to it in its very unreality. It is who we are, what we have become. I need to check in every once in a while just to stay informed on how far along the evolutionary scale we have fallen, how near the inevitable collapse is. And besides, I need to know that my 55” Ultra Hi-Def Smart TV is still keeping up with the Joneses.