I finished up work and had two errands to run. The second one was to go grocery shopping. Because of where my first errand was located, I went to Wal-Mart. I happened to shop at the Friday-after-work rush. My primary mission was to get groceries, but, hey, it's Wal-Mart so I decided to venture into the pharmacy and get a detangler for the girls and toothpaste for them, too.
Why do they put children's detangler in three places? There's the Equate brand right next to the Johnson and Johnson' s No More Tangles. Same size. $3 difference per bottle. I bought three. Two aisles away, there is the Suave collection. Suave, which smells apple-y and we've used before, costs 35 cents more per bottle than the Equate but still substantially less than the J&J. I put the Equate on the Suave shelf and picked up three bottles. I normally make a point of putting things back from whence they came, but the aisle traffic was brutal and I didn't negotiate back two aisles. Plus, detangler in one place is just more logical, no?
When I shop at my neighborhood grocery, it's well-choreographed. I know where everything is and I rarely have to double back. Not so at Wal-Mart. There's almost too much selection. Where's the yogurt we like? Oh! Here it is under the gooey cold mess of yogurt that spilled out from the brand we don't buy. How about a dozen eggs? There's a truckload from which to select. I went through 6 cartons of jumbo eggs before I got one with all 12 eggs intact. Grrr. Now that my freezer is cleaned out and my fridge is empty, I can stock up. I shop big. Two hours later, I check out. The noise of beeps and chatter and PA announcements is almost deafening. I asked the sales clerk how she can stand it? My head was spinning. True to form, I spent about $200 because that's the rate they charge me to be in their store: $100/hour.
DFC Update: I began organizing the children's music CDs in the nifty CD organizer I got today. At Wal-Mart.
15 years ago
1 comment:
When I was in high school I participated in a foreign exchange program with a group of high school students from Russia. They came to the States for a semester and lived with us, and after Christmas we went to Russia for a semester and lived with the same person. My Russian friends were simultaneously amazed and terrified by Walmart. When I went to Russia I understood why.
A Russian store is more like a kiosk in a mall, tucked back into the wall of the train station. You walked up and told the woman behind the thick plate glass what you wanted. There was one kind of soap, one kind of shampoo, one kind of spaghetti noodles, and one newspaper. A walk onto an entire aisle of shampoo befuddled them. My exchange partner had an interesting reaction: "Why does one person need that many choices?"
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