Comparison Shopping

 

This town has a WalMart and a K-mart. 

 

The WalMart is always packed to the gills, with screaming undisciplined (boooo, the worst kind!) children running rampant, and old people blocking the skinny aisles with their conversations, two cashiers to serve four hundred customers, and always the smell of burnt popcorn from the snack bar, and cigarette smoke wafting in from the lobby, where smoking is allowed and through which people have to walk to get to the actual front doors.  Oh, and all those machines and hobby-horses for kids are out in the smoky lobby, too.  Nice, huh.

 

The K-mart is usually borderline-deserted.  It always smells clean, the aisles are wide and swept, there are always enough cashiers, the prices are pretty much the same and often lower,  and there are several really good clothing stores and two great Chinese restaurants: one in the same complex and one across the street.

 

Why don't more people go to the K-mart?  Why are they all jam-packed in WalMart?

 

My husband hates K-mart.  He says he can never find anything.  He would go to WalMart daily if he could.

 

I hate WalMart.  I always feel like a salmon trying to swim upstream in stinky water.  I have seen people knocked down by wild dirty children, to the point that an ambulance had to be called, in our WalMart.  

 

The outdoor marquee at K-Mart once broke and fell on a guy and crushed him dead, a few years ago.  I still like K-Mart better.  The possibility of being crushed to death by a sign is a far better fate than being crushed to death by some of the people I've seen in our WalMart.  Don't people bathe before going shopping in public any more?

 

Martha Stewart spent some jail-time.  I still like her stuff better than Sam's.

 

When people walk into our WalMart, they somehow feel free to let their kids loose to run wild and screech and knock things (and people) down, and open boxes and sit on the floor in 'Toys" and play with merchandise that is not legally theirs.

 

When people walk into our K-Mart, they must somehow feel as though they are personally responsible for the behavior of their children, and I've never seen a kid running wild and loose in there.

 

What gives?

 

Soon, our WalMart will be no more.  They are building a Super Store in this town, and I can't even imagine what the crowd will be like with more room to hold their relay races and to cluster loaded carts in the middle of an aisle to converse.

 

It would be nice if the new store would forbid smoking anywhere near the premises but in this town that's probably asking too much.  I mean, without that smoking area, WalMart's clientele would be cut in half.

 

Although, when I'm in the mood to do some shopping at 3 in the morning, it's nice to have something that's open.  K-Mart closes at ten.  WalMart is open 24/7.

 

Well, some of it is open 24/7.  You can't buy a watch or jewelry or electronics or fabric or perfume or wallets or cd's or film or dvd's or snacks then, but you can buy toilet paper and Miracle Whip.

 

Why else would anyone need to run to town at that hour, anyway? 

 

But except for the occasional toilet paper emergency, give me K-Mart any time.  If those are my only two choices, that is.  In this town, that's pretty much it.

 

If there was a Target in this town, I'd never go anywhere else.  For toilet paper, etc, that is.