Asshole Taxonomy presents: “Wal-Mart Shoppers”

After reading Canada Jackson post on Asshole Taxonomy, I felt the need to share some of my thoughts and encounters with Assholes in Scranton. While Demarcations is clearly a place where assholes gather and make crude attempts at socializing, a true hotbed for assholes and other bottom feeders is none other than your local small business-destroying corporation, Wal-Mart. The assholes you meet here will truly astound you and deserve their own classification and are simply titled "Wal-Mart Shoppers."

I had never been to Wal-Mart before I went to school in Scranton, so what I knew about Wal-Mart I heard from other people at school. I imagined a store of immense size where everything you could imagine for sale, where everything is clean, and where people were pleasant. This is not what I witnessed when I first visited Wal-Mart. First, there was the sign stretched across the front reading “Grand Re-Opening.” Can you really have a grand re-opening? The parking lot was littered with cars and trucks that seemed to have all been involved in the same monster truck/demolition derby show. When I entered the store I realized that this was a place where culture goes to die and where social inadequacies somehow becomes advantages. Trying to navigate a shopping cart through any part of the store felt as if I was stuck in some bizarre video game where I had to avoid being struck by rogue carts and fat children. It was as if they had released ever retard in Scranton and put them in Wal-Mart with a shopping cart. I was routinely hit from behind by other carts or had to quickly stop to avoid hitting some obese child making a break for the free sample lady. Scientists who study obesity and why it is so prominent in this nation need not look at the human genome, but only need to visit their local Wal-Mart, and they will discover that the average grocery cart has enough garbage in it to put a family of three into a diabetic coma.

Unfortunately, that was not the last time I visited Wal-Mart during the years in Scranton. It seemed that no matter what time you visited this pustule, there was also something unnerving to witness. On one occasion Canada and I had to go to Wal-Mart for some reason, and immediately upon entering, we saw in the 10-items-or-less-lane, an enormous fattie of a women arguing with the clerk over coupons. I’m betting this cow was upset because she couldn’t get enough off her fifteen loaves of Wonder Bread. She was dressed in black, most likely hoping that the color would have the beneficial “slimming effect” that she had read in US magazine. She was covered in crumbs, and I can only guess where the crumbs came from, probably from the sixteenth loaf of Wonder Bread she pounded before getting to the register. Unfortunately for her, and anyone who happened to look at her, she more closely resembled something that had just been dragged out of the La Brea Tar Pits, with a light coating of bread crumbs.

I can only imagine the shanty this plaque of a human lives in. Wooden paneling being held up with staples, six cars strewn across the front yard, all with “Terrorist Hunting License” bumper stickers on the back. The smell of freshly microwaved SPAM wafting through the air, two brand new satellite dishes on the roof, but plywood in the windows. This is the the type house that shows up on one of those lame excuses for reality TV that the once respectable A&E now peddles. “Tonight, on Home Exterminators, we visit a house that is overridden with cockroaches and toxic mold.”

Several times upon going to Wal-Mart we would see stray children meandering through the aisles totally unsupervised. Where are these children’s parents? Wait, I forgot there was a sale on anti-freeze in aisle 48. I bet they were looking to get drunk good and cheap. And why not! It’s cheap and tastes like sugar. The products that you find in the “watch for falling prices” bins always amazed me too. Eight DVDs for $2.50! Hot Dog! I’ve always wondered how the Japanese interpreted Snow White. Camouflage linens? Heck Yes! How’d they know I wanted it to look like I was sleeping in a pile of leaves? Perhaps it wasn’t that these bins existed that amazed me, but the fact that people actually bought the crap in them. I even remember two acne scared teenagers arguing over some lame ass DVD. How about the lard ass ripping open the toy boxes while good old tramp stamped mom is hitting on the stock boy? Saw that.

As I said earlier, Wal-Mart is where culture goes to die. Any place that I can visit at 3am and buy a gun, an Ipod, NASCAR underwear, a desk and knock off Dr. Pepper should be shut down and firebombed with extreme prejudice. The philistines that lurk around Wal-Mart would undoubtedly think you were making a “momma” joke if you asked them if they had ever been inside the MOMA. The closest these people come to hanging art in their homes is the Boondock Saints poster and the poster of Bob Marley smoking a blunt they have on their kitchen walls. These are the type of people who save up their money to buy a new fishing boat instead of getting their cavities filled.

I’m sure you can tell that Wal-Mart shoppers do not hold a special place in my heart. Even just visiting Wal-Mart I feel as if a bit of my soul has been crushed. If you don’t believe me, just drive up to your local Wal-Mart and spend a few hours people watching and I’m sure you’ll feel the same way.