my love/hate relationship with wal-mart

growing up a military brat, i kind of missed the boat on the whole wal-mart phenom. the BX (or PX, whichever you prefer) was my military wal-mart equivalent, minus SALES TAX, the awful smell, and clueless 'customer service' employees.
[shouts to AAFES employees! i did my time as a cashier the year i lived in japan. whatup powerzone and c-area?]

it wasn't until i was 13 years old and living in rural northern louisiana that i discovered the importance and social significance, if you will, of the multi-billion dollar franchise that is wal-mart. a few years before i moved to that small town in louisiana, a wal-mart had opened (edit: a super wal-mart), creating not only a place of one-stop all-night shopping, but also a social hub where you could, at any given moment, get hit on by questionable looking dudes, asked for 5 dolla by someone with a bootleg louie-V purse, see 3 ex-boyfriends and 2 ex-pastors all in the same place - awkward! (especially the exes and pastors, when you're there in sweats with your current boo at 11:00 at night. but that comes later.) having no other choice, my family gradually accepted wal-mart as one of the world's evils: i mean, they did have the cheapest groceries and housewares in town.

we later moved on to places with bases, usually opting for the power BX+commissary combination over wal-mart. even during my college days, i found myself avoiding the stench of wal-mart if at all possible.

to add insult to injury, a few years back i saw what would later become one of my favorite documentaries "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price." [netflix that shiz if you haven't seen it.] though it's a little long and the production isn't stellar, the message is clear: DON'T SHOP AT WAL-MART. i learned that not only are their employees (managers and supervisors included) disgustingly underpaid, the cheap chinese labor it takes to make those 3 dollar train toys (probably covered in lead) that your baby puts all in his mouth is keeping 13-year old chinese girls in flats half the size of USC dorm bathrooms. not to MENTION the fact that small businesses suffer immediately and irreversibly when wal-mart comes to town.
with regards to the low prices, [word to my grandpa] if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

all that being said, there's no doubt that times is hard. times is reaal hard. and, to put it bluntly, i'd rather that chinese girl stay living in that flat than me be out an extra hundred bucks for having shopped at whole foods rather than wal-mart solely on principle. without a BX around, the cheapest grocery shopping option is..*ding ding ding*..yup, wal-mart ftw.

yet i now find myself in a land that knows not of wal-mart. remember paris hilton on the simple life? "what's a wal-mart?" yeah, they don't exist in LA. unless of course you want to make your way down crenshaw, to probably be met with countless cops holding up traffic on (conveniently) the very side of the road you're trying to drive down. not my cup'a boba, if you ask me.

so now i find myself broke, but in an even stranger place: fiending for a wal-mart. who would'a thought?

f*ck wal-mart, though.