Today I went to pick up vegetables at the local Walmart. Passed by the employee on the cig-break and dodged the watermelons displayed out-front before getting my basket. With the entrance I’m always thrown in for a contemplation, and a waff of almost uncomfortable A/C.
Walmart, in some ways, is a koan in itself. Or perhaps a marker – at least an invitation to how you view the world. Of course to many it is just a grocery store and there’s nothing more to say. Yet to the logistics planner Walmart may render itself as a marvel. Though not particular to Walmart, the grocery store is a modern marvel: fruits of all seasons in all times. Stocks of anything and everything you’d need. To have access from cilantro to rutabagas with Oreos between: it truly is the shining light of suburban culture.
Walmart in particular holds many layers within it. Symbolically some could render it as the excess, others as the staple of America. Whenever I walk around Walmart, all the people look so ill and sickly, and it’s no surprise really: most of the food in there is designed to kill you softly.
Walking around Walmart with its peppy “in” radio music while dodging either extremely obese jaundiced shoppers or maybe those with a drug habit or two, I genuinely sometimes cannot stop laughing as I walk about. It just puts me in such a strangely good mood at how absurd it all is. You have the modern marvel of logistics in front of you, and then all of these advertisements pointing you to the things which are neigh-imperishable, and so the carts fill themselves. Or the motor vehicle. There’s always one person using those. I love them so much.
Walking through the Chip aisle – a whole aisle dedicated to chips! – makes me just roar with laughter. Let’s not even talk about the cookie aisle, or the dessert section of the freezer. Some of the advertising on these frozen boxes just tickle me to no end. Things like double-laden syrup’d corndogs with blueberry bursts. YES!
There are many layers to Walmart if you wanted to view it with a stricter lens. We covered how it truly is a logistical miracle, and how it’s a cultural constellation of the truly sick and abandoned and food-stamped-in. One can zoom out even further and wonder how much Walmart is subsidized by federal agencies, black-box budget and hidden board members. It makes me laugh a lot to think about how we’re working so hard for green paper things to trade in to – for the majority of items available in a Walmart, if you had to dice roll – poison oneself with.
Screaming children stomping around with a battle-axe mother all tatted, inbetween the unclockable foreigners and extremely tired employees vaping between with the earnest younger employee assured that hard-work makes a good life – I don’t know, it just feels like a lens into the heart of American demographic and it just makes me laugh so much. And then we all take it so seriously: be sure to line up and turn in your paper slips for your hits!
Everyone looks so ill while they load up on those corn dogs and the normalization of gigantic meat sections or cheese sections – seeing a tidily wrapped tray of beef burgers, or a decapitated chicken and the blood sprays right in my eyes thinking about the slaughterhouse, and all the while some generic upbeat song is playing in the background with the abrasive lighting: I can’t stop laughing. I’m genuinely chuckling the entire time, especially passing the more sickly looking ones with a whole shopping cart filled with fruit punch. Everyone is slowly killing themselves, if not loading up on medicine: there’s even a pharmaceutical department for that! Just this mixture of absurdity and cruelty all dolled up as a Walmart Shopping Experience™ where you can hear the “Thank you for shopping at Walmart!” from the self-checkout registers.
The layers of Walmart mix in the essence of humanity and the horrors lurking. Smelling the candle tarts and giving oneself a headache: what else!
God bless America.