Women are supposed to enjoy shopping.

Wally World

While some blossom being surrounded by people and love the attention a huge crowd of people can bring, others find it incredibly overwhelming and stressful. I personally don’t mind the limelight and generally want to be the center of attention in large groups, but there are different kinds of crowds that bring different kinds of interactions. One such crowd gathers in the well-known shopping center Walmart. This wonderland of foreign made goods at discount prices attracts all kinds of people at all times of day and large numbers of them at that.

My family and I usually avoid shopping at Walmart unless absolutely necessary. Last week it was absolutely necessary according to my mother. Walmart is the only store in the area that carries Mrs. Meyer’s cleaning supplies, so we decided to do all of our shopping there and get the Meyers. It was already crowded when we arrived and only became more so as the 18^th hour approached.

It became nearly impossible to maneuver through the aisles without bumping into other shoppers or running over children running loose through the store. As we did not know our way around the shopping center we had to go through most of the store to find our few items. When we got to the cleaning supplies aisle, we discovered that the store was out of Mrs. Meyer’s, the entire reason we were there. We had already been there for two hours and only had half of our shopping done. As the crowd grew, so did our frustration. We ultimately decided to just stop where we were, buy what we had, and go to our usual shopping center. The trip through Winco took only 30 minutes buying approximately the same amount of items and there wasn’t near the amount of people.

I admit that I have always been prejudice against Walmart, but that was for reasons completely different from the exasperating shopping environment. I took a social justice class in high school and large part of the class was dedicated solely to Walmart. The human injustices committed by the company are almost hard to believe. The living and working conditions of their workers in China are/were obscene, they hired illegal immigrants here in the U.S. and locked them in the stores overnight, and in some stores colored female employees were prevented from getting promoted specifically because of their race and gender. The company is very anti-workers’ unions as well. The company was also guilty of partaking in practices that harmed the environment. Walmart has recently been working to make changes in these areas, though not every fault has been corrected.

So on top of their piss poor practices, shopping in their stores is incredibly frustrating. Their low prices don’t make up for their low-quality products and aren’t even always lower than their competitors. I am still perturbed about that shopping trip and am finding fewer and fewer reasons to ever shop there again.