The K-Mart Shopping Rules

A few weeks ago I blew off a little steam about Wal-Mart and the “quality” of shoppers we encounter there. Recently, I had to pick up something and I decided to dash into a nearby K-Mart instead because it was close to where I worked. Holy Mother of Pearl! I haven’t been in one of those in years, but I learned quickly shopping there is a whole lot different! The Wal-Mart rules do not apply when you enter K-Mart. Instead, try these…

1. Be careful where you push your cart. – No lie, there are potholes big enough to lose your kid in! The stores have been rearranged so often that the cheap linoleum flooring has permanent dents, scratches, and marks of racks gone by. As a result, you could just find yourself strolling merrily along with your cart only to find it suddenly disappear in front of you.

2. There are dark corners of the store…avoid them. – Entering your local K-Mart is somewhat akin to entering a war zone.  The pile of clothes you see crumpled on the floor might be discarded sale items, a homeless person, or a dead body. Stay to the center of the store, keep in the clearly marked and pitted main aisles (such as they are), and don’t touch anything you can’t clearly identify. There are areas of the store that are dark. The lights have not worked in those fixtures in years, and the salespeople have learned to avoid them. You should do the same.

3. You have no friends in K-Mart. -  Think of your first few minutes there as your first few minutes in prison. You are the new meat, and if you look at someone the wrong way there is a good possibility they’ll shank you in the dog food aisle. Keep your eyes ahead of you, avoiding direct eye contact with anyone else–including salespeople. Remember, these are the folks who were considered too scary to work at Wal-Mart. There is a reason they’re hiding in Sporting Goods.

4. It will be a long time before you ever see your family again. – There may be 8 registers, but only one of them will have a cashier…and it is her first day. You may have run in there for a box of laundry detergent, but you’d better grab a bag of chips on your way to the checkout. By the time you reach the register, you’ll need something to keep your strength up. K-Mart is one of the few stores in which you can time the checkouts with a calendar rather than a stopwatch. Make sure you really, truly need it before you go in there to buy anything…and then take a picture of your family along so you can remember them as the days go by while you are in line.

5. You probably won’t find what you’re looking for, so be flexible. – Maybe you walked in wanting a can of Pringles chips. Well, most of the shelves at K-Mart are what they like to call “in flux”, which means they’re empty. Instead of Pringles, you might find a lovely bag of Lays chips that are only two months out of date. You could be looking for a box of Froot Loops, but you might have to settle for some Purina Dog Chow. Understand that when you walk through the doors to K-Mart you are entering a wonderland of mystery and excitement. Be flexible so you can enjoy the whole experience as it is meant to be.

That’s my experience after stopping at the local Big K. I think it’s time I paid Target a visit…

Give Me Back My Sugar!

When I was a kid, breakfast was a special time. I ran downstairs in my Spider-Man jammies and found this huge, heaping bowl of pure colored sugar in bright lumps of yellow, green, and blue. It was a glorious time! It was like having dessert for breakfast every day!

Now I’ve grown up and have kids of my own, and they have no idea what it’s like to enjoy a sugar rush first thing in the morning. When I was a kid the words Sugar and Sweet were huge on the box! Now all you can see are the words “Nutrition” and “Healthy”. If you want to see sugar anywhere, you’ll have to look in the ingredients. And why did this happen? Because a bunch of lazy folks were too stupid to say “You know, I don’t have to eat an entire box of this stuff for breakfast every day…one bowl might be enough!”. Instead, they sue the cereal guys because there’s some grand conspiracy to actually make their product taste good and in the process turn everyone in America into fat people! 

Well, since you want to ruin it for the rest of us, here’s my simple solution: narrow the aisles for the sugary stuff! Healthy foods, sundries, sodas are all regular aisles…but there is this special part of the store–we’ll call it “Candy Land”–that only skinny people can fit into. The aisles are so close together you can’t even get a cart in there. Fat people can only look at it from a distance and dream.

It works as a deterrent too! Once you get too big to fit in the skinny aisle, you know it’s time to cut back for a while! And any skinny person caught buying stuff for a fat guy waiting in the healthy section loses their rights to Candy Land for a year. That’ll work.

So bring back my sugar rushes! I miss the days of getting up from the breakfast table and hearing air! I miss fighting to control my shaking hands long enough to tie my tennis shoes! I miss the uncontrollable fits of giggling first thing in the morning!

And who is the creep that decided to stop putting cheap plastic toys in  the box!?! Oh, it’s a choking hazard for kids? Puh-leeze! I went through hundreds of boxes as a kid and had the common sense every time to say “Hey, that doesn’t look like the rest of my Frosted Flakes! I’ll bet it’s a toy.” And if your kid’s too small to know the difference, then pour their cereal for them and put the box away! I don’t want to mail in 7 proofs of purchase and five bucks shipping & handling for a Froot Loops race car! I want it waiting at the bottom of my box for me, shivering as I tear into that sugary cereal on my way to it!

Come on, Toucan Sam, make breakfast fun again!

The Wal-Mart Shopping War Rules

I’m going to give you a little heads-up about shopping at Wal-Mart: we men don’t usually find that fun in the least. If we’re there, our only thought is getting through and getting out of there as soon as possible. As such, I’m going to help you folks out a little bit by giving you the rules for shopping at Wal-Mart:

1. Shopping at Wal-Mart is not a social event. If you happen to run into someone you know, the proper greeting is a simple nod of the head to each other as you pass by and keep the flow moving. If you have some pressing information they simply must know about, say, “Hey, call me…we’ve gotta talk!”. If they’re your friend, they’ll call. If they don’t call, they probably don’t want to hear you stupid story about Aunt Sadie’s back surgery, or what little Bobby did in school last week. Just to let you know: we don’t want to hear it either. If you choose to ignore this advice, block the aisle and carry on your conversation as the carts pile up behind you, don’t get upset when someone lobs a loaf of bread at the back of your head. Not that I would ever do that, but I’m just saying…

2. Shopping at Wal-Mart is not a visit to a museum or art gallery. For heaven’s sake, move along! I can’t stand it when someone gets in the middle of the aisle and stares around at everything like they’ve just walked into the Louvre. Nothing has changed since last week when you were in here, so keep going! If the pretty colored boxes and shiny things distract you enough to slow down, then send someone else out there to do your shopping for you. The rest of us are not here to just pass the time. We want to go home, so get out of our way or we will have to run over you!

3. The self-checkout lines are for other people–don’t use them. Ever have this happen: you run in to buy milk and bread, but the “20 item or less” lane is backed up so you think you’ll just jump into the self- checkout line and be back to the car in no time…but the person in front of you in the line is acting like they’ve never seen a bar code before and is amazed every time the machine beeps as they pass something over it. Maybe it’s just because I live in the South, but when the person actually starts giggling when the machine beeps, I know it’s over. And watching the person keep hitting the “Skip Bagging” button just because they can’t figure it out is a treat too. Every third item makes the register shut down until the cashier comes and fixes it, all the while listening to the person complaining about how “the register is broken or something”. There should be an IQ test required for everyone who wants to use the self-checkout so they’d become useful again.

4. “10 Items or Less” is not a suggestion. Again, trying to do a quick shopping trip becomes a drawn-out nightmare when the person in front of you heaves their cart into the line with food pouring over the sides. Then they look at you like “What?” and start carefully pulling items from the grocery Jenga they’ve set up in their cart. If you can’t at a simple glance tell you have 10 items or less, then you probably have more than that. If you get into the “10 Items or Less” line with a cart full of food, it should be mandatory that you get 2 bags at the most for all your stuff. If it doesn’t fit in two bags, you can carry it out by hand.

5. Your kid is screaming…and we can hear it. I love it when I’m shopping and I notice this loud wail coming from three aisles down. It  sounds like one of those tornado sirens, but soon enough I find it’s some little brat stuck in the shopping cart and turning a wonderful shade of blue as the oxygen races from its lungs and past its brain without stopping. And of course, the mother with the child acts as if she doesn’t hear a thing. She thinks if she ignores the child, then that automatically silences it for the rest of the world. Here’s a tip: it doesn’t! If you don’t want to spank your child, that’s fine. Just bend down, put your mouth right next to his ear so he doesn’t miss a word, and describe in detail what you’re going to do to the child when you get home if they don’t shut up. Or pick a random scary stranger (you’re in Wal-Mart, I promise there’s one nearby) and tell the child if they don’t be quiet the man will haul them away in his minivan. Hey, it worked for my dad…and I grew up to be normal!

These are the first five simple rules for the Wal-Mart Shopping War. There will be more to follow as I continue to purchase groceries and find myself pushed to the edge of sanity and beyond, but this is where it starts.