Even More Trouble In the Aisles

GM,

Maybe it’s time for a lighter note—a Wal-Mart note. Making my first trip to the white-trash embassy since my last entry about it, I personally witnessed a woman in her 70s use the self checkout lane last night. My initial admiration of her courage to confront technology soon dissolved when I saw her scan, bag, swipe her debit card, enter the PIN, and pocket the receipt for each item in her cart. Needless to say, my fascination with this complete confusion of the system ended when she made it to the fruit; even multiples were separated (I now know the product code for oranges). As you may imagine, the pace at which she went wouldn’t have satisfied me even if she understood the concept completely. You also won’t be surprised to hear that the lone customer service representative was content to sit and watch as the Waltons’ money and my patience were lost transaction by transaction. I’m convinced that the self-checkout lane is the single greatest separator of the wheat from the chaff in this 21st-century society.

Then again, in a world where technology has us handcuffed to our phones, where human resource departments add to the complexity and ambiguity of application processes just to lower the number of Internet applicants, where the University of Colorado ruins it for everybody, where male-enhancement-pill advertisements run so rampant that I wonder if everyone else is getting an unfair advantage, maybe it’s time to show some understanding for a lack of understanding. (Told you today would be lighthearted!) Wal-Mart granny isn't so bad compared to these offenders.

-JW

JW,

Perhaps because I'm still staggering from the news that M. C. Hammer was at least partially responsible for Michael Crabtree's new deal with the San Francisco 49ers, I can't get too worked up about your newest Wal-Mart story (though your oldest one still gives me fits). Or perhaps it's the fact that 43-year-old blogger Penelope Trunk used Twitter earlier this week to announce her miscarriage-in-progress. (Here's the story: The It's-A-Good-Thing-Because-Abortion-Waits-Are-So-Long-In-Wisconsin moment near the end is especially charming.) In either case, don't get mad if I refrain from outrage at the technological cluelessness of the elderly. I'm not ashamed to admit that those self-checkouts slow me down, too.

The Wal-Mart employee who stood watching, on the other hand, is deserving of some fairly serious ire. I'll go so far as to call him (it was a white male, right?) a representation of much of what ails us as a society. What kind of person--and I mean this very seriously--would sit by and watch wanton destruction (of time and money, unintentional or not) without attempting to intervene? What deeply ingrained cultural flaw (Is it anger? Is it resentment?) allows such behavior?

If there's a lesson here, it's that those folks who complain about Wal-Mart's mistreatment of its employees must rarely shop there. Otherwise they'd see that mistreatment is sometimes called for.

-GM