All Dollars Lead to Wal-Mart

I've been to Wal-Mart twice in the last three days, and it seems pretty clear to me that they're not even trying anymore to maintain any illusion that they're anything but a giant concrete box to which one flocks to buy stuff at prices purposely designed to funnel money out of the pockets of local business people and into the pockets of people in whatever town it is in Arkansas where the Wal-Mart people are located. Some observations:

:: The floors. Whenever I go to Target, for example, the floors are always clean. Ditto the local supermarkets (most of them). Wal-Mart's floors, though, have that permanent-scuff-mark thing going on that's about what you find in any thirty-year-old Goodwill store. And in some remote corners of the store, the floor is disturbingly close to what you find in a movie theater.

:: The bathrooms. Wal-Mart's bathrooms didn't use to smell, but they do now. And two out of four sinks having running water? Wow. And I love how they're located in an unmarked corridor behind the customer service counter, as if the company is saying, "OK, here's a bathroom. But you gotta find it yourself, and if you gotta wash your hands, find the soap and the water yer damn self."

:: The customer service area. It's just inside the main entrance, which is normal for big-box retailers, but whereas in other stores - - Target, again - - it's always easy to get to, at Wal-Mart it's on the opposite side of a railing and assorted whatnot to make it almost inaccessible from the cash register area. So, if you discover a problem after the point-of-purchase, you literally have to exit the store and re-enter to get to the service desk. Or, you decide that the dollar or whatever isn't worth it. Tricky.

:: I suspect that Wal-Mart employs a team of engineers whose job it is to figure out exactly how much space can be used in their stores for merchandise, and still allow the passage of a single shopping cart in each direction. Each time I go to Wal-Mart - - I average about one visit a month; this week's two was an aberration - - there is more stuff piled in what used to be the space between aisles, which has reached such a point that there are literally new aisles being created where there were none before.

:: Part of Wal-Mart's obvious strategy of cramming more crap inside its walls, at the expense of cart-navigation space, is smaller carts. But still, not small enough that two carts can actually pass one another within an aisle. If two carts meet each other in an aisle, proceeding in opposite directions, one must literally turn around and exit the way one entered. And if someone enters behind you, and someone's coming the other way, you'd better hope the person moving the other way has the presence of mind to realize that the onus of turning around rests on their shoulders; otherwise, you're locked in until one of the other two parties clues in. And if you, as a man, have ended up in this situation by ducking down, say, the "feminine hygiene products" aisle as a shortcut to the toothpaste aisle, well, forget it. You're screwed.

:: Wal-Mart has also abandoned any pretense of making the shelves attractive, in favor of the "Here's the crap, buy it so we can get more crap in its place" approach. Thus, the merchandise is no longer nicely removed from the large carton in which it originally arrived at the store and placed attractively on the shelves; instead, the employees merely use a box-cutter to slash open one entire side of that carton and slap the carton itself on the shelves. (Unless, of course, it's not actually in one of the aisles but instead in one of those islands-of-merchandise Wal-Mart now erects in the formerly-wide spaces that divided one section from another. In that case, the cartons are simply stacked right on the floor, or perhaps on their original wooden shipping pallet.

:: Wal-Mart now entrusts employees who have absolutely no business having their voices broadcast across the store's PA system to read long-winded bulletins about the latest specials over the store's PA system. "Attention shoppers; is this thing on?" is not a phrase one should hear over the speakers. And certainly not twice. And it should never be obvious that, while the poor employee is reading the eight pages of specials (single-spaced, front-and-back) over the PA system, one of her co-workers is making faces and/or obscene gestures in a successful effort to make her laugh.

Everything about Wal-Mart nowadays signals an attitude of grudging acceptance of the customer. I think that Wal-Mart's official business philosophy is now something like this: "Professionalism? Service? Convenience? Pish-tosh! We now have you all trained to come to us, sheep-like, for your two-gallon jugs of laundry soap for a buck and your ten-packs of Froot-of-the-Loom underwear. Abandon hope, foolish mortals, for we shall have your money." And damned if they don't.

UPDATE: Lynn makes a few points, in the comments, that I should probably address. It's important to make the distinction that I can't claim to disparage the entire company, but this does seem to be the way of it in most Wal-Marts I've been in, as well. There are four Wal-Marts in the Buffalo area, and to some degree they're all like this. One of them is actually not as bad, but none of them is remotely as clean, pleasant, or easy to get around in as our Targets. The same is true of the ones I frequented in Syracuse, although there is a Wal-Mart SuperCenter about fifteen miles or so from Syracuse that we went to a couple of times that had none of these flaws. That particular store was spotless and pleasant. I had the same complaints, to a varying degree, about Wal-Marts in the Southern Tier; several in Pennsylvania; and several in West Virginia. I haven't been in a Wal-Mart in a dozen states, but I've been in a bunch of them, and pretty far afield. I've yet to encounter one that I genuinely consider to be superior to Target. (I have been in a couple of crappy Target's, but just as the one indisputably good Wal-Mart I've been in doesn't outweight the generally inferior ones I've frequented, those lousy Target's don't detract from the ones that I really enjoy in Buffalo and Pennsylvania.)

What really puzzles me is that Wal-Mart is a relatively new entity in New York State, with the stores in the Buffalo and Western New York area having been open less than eight years. Target came in just a couple of years later, and those stores in this area are far cleaner and still look new. (This is not a consideration in Syracuse, where Target opened its first outlets just last November.)

It's dangerous, of course, to extrapolate one's experience in a single outlet of a large chain to the entire company. Having worked in large restaurant chains I'm well familiar with people coming in and saying things like "Geez, the one in our town stinks, but this one's nice." (Yes, I've been on the receiving end of it going the other way, too.) But if all politics is local, so too is consumer loyalty. All I have to go on is my experience.