« Is Varifrank a sexist pig? | Main | It's Moving Day For 'The Anchoress' »

10 Helpful Tips for Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart has decided it needs to shape up its image. We here at Varifrank are always interested in helping American business, so in that spirit, we offer the following:

---All of these suggestions from yours truly are compiled from real ‘true life’ observations - I kid you not!

10. Let’s try actually stacking goods on the shelves rather than just putting the cardboard packing boxes in the aisles and cutting the tops off, so the customers can just reach in and ‘fend for themselves’. Unpacking and shelving the goods is a tradition that goes back for centuries in the mercantile industry. It’s a little known fact that people prefer to “walk” in the aisles, not crawl over the shipping boxes in an attempt to buy cookies for the obscene price of 1.50 for a box of 36.

9. By the way, Christmas starts the day AFTER Thanksgiving. Please refrain from any sort of Christmas display until then and then have the whole spectacle wrapped up no later than Jan 1st. I don’t care what calendar you follow, I don’t care what religious sect you belong to, Christmas does not start in September. It doesn’t help to get me in the “Christmas Spirit” if I have to dwell on it for 6 months of the year.

8. ‘Door Greeters’ should be required to wear their teeth (both uppers and lowers) and/or not chew “tobaccee”, sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or generally eat their lunch while also handing our carts at the door. Try to remember folks, you are the face of Wal-Mart, so be sure to shake twice and zip up all the way after tinkling, wear matching socks and shoes(one each on each foot, sock first THEN the shoe) , comb the crumbs out your facial hair( both women and men) and smile for goodness sake, its not much of a job, but you can at least pretend to like it.

7. When establishing the policy of allowing RV’s to stay in the parking lot, please remind the RV “guests” that while they are using the Wal-Mart parking lot to stay overnight that they are not to dump their waste tanks into said parking lot and then leave at first light. If the staff find that this has been done, they are to remove by any means necessary the offending fluids and raw materials prior to the store opening, preferably that very same day. If the offending parties are ‘caught in the act’ it would not be too far out of line to hang them from the parking lot light posts as a warning to others. Too gruesome you say? Look, this is Wal-Mart, the little shop of horrors has got nothin' on this place.

6. Please be sure to remind shoppers that food eaten while in the store is counted as a purchased item, whether it is finished before they get to the register or not. Simply putting the unfinished item back in the shelf does not bring the purchaser a ‘store credit’.

5. Please remove any partially eaten candy and drink containers and dirty diapers from the register aisle, thrice hourly.

4. Remember, first impressions count. So try to treat the primary door threshold as a way to welcome your incoming guests rather than force them to wade through a barricade of scattered 3 wheeled shopping carts, horseflies and leaflets advertising the goods in the very store they have already chosen to visit. Many customers feel that getting pushed face first into a running garbage disposal is no way to say “thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart”.

3. The 2.99 DVD bin in the video section that sits right in the aisle, effectively blocking the through traffic for half the store? Remove it immediately as it is a hazard to navigation. The mob action feeding frenzy that occurs in this area makes any science fiction spectacle in “Soylent Green” pale by comparison. If you cant remove it because the mob wont let you get near their chance to buy the “Larry the cable guy” DVD for the low, low price of 2.99, then I suggest getting some of those front loading ‘people skippers’ they had in Soylent Green to keep the mobs at bay.

2. I do not care how many times you say its ‘not true’ and I don’t care what kind of “rollback” you give as an incentive to buy, you must understand that fish, even Wal-Mart fish do not willingly float upside down. Please consider these fish to be “defective” and “not for sale”, the rest of the world does, you should too. Please keep the ratio of upside down fish to right side up fish in its true perspective.

1. The toy section. Good god, It’s a store folks, not a playground. Wal-Mart managers, please supervise this area, actually go so far as to assign someone to watch over camp “runamuck” during working hours. Children should not ride the bikes, throw footballs, open the board games or beat each other with baseball bats while ‘mummee and daddee’ go shopping.

Yes, I shop at Wal-Mart. I do not think they are a bad store, but I do think that they could spend just a second and look at what the store looks like and how it presents itself. Just because they sell it cheap doesn’t mean they have to act cheap. I don’t care where you are and I don’t care what time of day it is, or how new the store, they are always dirty. There is no excuse for this. There isn’t anything at Wal-Mart that you can’t find at Target, yet I always feel like I need a shower after I shop at Wal-Mart. I prefer to shop at Sam’s Club as they seem to have done everything right that Wal-Mart gets wrong. Unfortunately, Sam’s Club only sells items by the metric ton.

Just so it doesn’t appear that I’m picking on Wal-Mart, Here’s another list called

“Things I’ve seen at Winco”.

1. A Woman in robe, slippers and hair in curlers buying groceries. Right out of central casting. Yes, she wanted a carton of Salem Menthol Cigarettes too. You could not make a better billboard for birth control than the sight of this woman in her full regalia.

2. A Woman customer changing baby diaper in line while checking out groceries.

3. The same woman sets her baby down on countertop afterwards while she writes the check. The final disposition of diaper was never discovered. The cashier nearly fainted dead away. Yes, the diaper was full. I didn’t need to see it to know that it needed to be changed, if you get my drift.

4. A husband throwing baked beans at wife. Multiple cans, no hits.

5. His wife throwing canned potatoes back at him. Multiple cans. She was a better shot, he went down in three cans. Through all of it, store partons continued to shop unabated and undisturbed. One elderly Hispanic woman waded through the scene of spilled cans and lost romance in a sea of blue police to get what she wanted as if it happened every day. And for all I know, it might very well have.

6. A Couple with kids grazing their way through fresh fruit aisle. One bite each and on to the next. peaches, pears, apples, bananas, cant get enough fruit in the kids diet, eh mom and dad?

7. A week later I see the same couple with the same kids grazing through the bulk foods section. Apparently no one told them that the bulk sugar free candies have a special feature – its called “maltitol”. I wanted to stop them and tell them that they were eating handfuls of the world strongest laxative, but I just couldn’t do it. Talking to people like that is like talking to my dog, you try to tell them "hey dont eat that!, its bad for you" and they just hear "blah,blah,blah eat that blah blah blah blah..."

Posted @ April 07, 2005 11:42 PM | Current Affairs

Posted by: mcat at April 8, 2005 11:44 PM

Posted by: Jack Grey at April 9, 2005 01:09 AM

Posted by: Infidel at April 10, 2005 03:44 PM

Posted by: beautifulatrocities at April 12, 2005 10:14 AM