In retail food Wal-Mart is ‘The Great Stan’ ‘The 800 pound Gorilla in the room.’ However they achieve this on a slim profit margin, only made possible by low payroll and high volume. I’m currently out of the grocery loop, with my head buried deep up my allegorical canal trying to locate my metaphor.
Why Wal-Marts in the Baltimore area now closed after midnight is not known to me. But I have a hunch it has to do with loss prevention, or rather the lack of it. Most likely one store detective is trying to cover two to three stores, relying on middle-aged female managers and overweight female security guards to stop the near looting proportions of shoplifting.
With the example of overnight Wal-Mart customers we had last night, I can only imagine what a nightmare it is to be a midnight shift manager in one of those heinous temples to low quality excess. The one local cop who cares about overnight employees stopped in to warn us about the horde approaching, as there was also a teen event letting out at midnight.
-There was the 350 pound bald woman with the two 450 pound bald teenage sons jiggling on by, in three varieties, one black trio, and two white. I have come to the conclusion that viewing pro wrestling causes premature baldness.
-There were a half dozen 50-60 year old fat men with canes cruising around on handicapped carts.
-There was the sixty-year old hippie woman in the denim tent-like skirt who came to stand next to me as I kneeled stocking the sour cream. Let me tell you, her cream was a great deal more sour than mine. The funk rising from her heavy skirt rivaled the dumpster behind Al’s Seafood.
-As a half naked couple walked in wearing mere threads, skipping down the aisle in dirty bare feet, the girl’s belly button tattooed around in the form of a vagina, Bubba the cashier groaned, “I so hate people. This night is going to get even worse.”
-No fewer than six women and five men lined up with great anticipation to use our very small single stall restrooms, as if crapping in a public place was some sanctifying rite of—yes, I’m going there—passage. I was breaking down freight in the cramped stockroom next to the woman’s room and felt like a sewage worker. These chicks did not even bother closing the door, but left it wide open—I think the cows broke the door spring.
-Two wannabe gang bangers showed up with their shirts draped over their necks, showing off the unreadable tattoos on their tootsie roll torsos.
-A third of the customers were eating and shopping at the same time, tossing their empty bottles, boxes, and crab cake trays, pistachio shells and shrimp exoskeletons onto the shelving.
-One 40-year-old couple argued over the brand of hotdogs they would purchase as her body odor wafted up from exposed armpits, as she was dressed like Daisy Duke, with a physique closer to Laurence Fishburne than his daughter.
-At about 1 a.m. a family of giant man-babies and sagging mammas miscalculated their order by a large sum. Steevo was assigned to “re-shop” the merchandize, and stopped by my work station to gripe,
“Must everything these lazy fuckers by be shitty? They can’t buy soap to wash their ass but they can eat more in a month than I eat all year—and they just have to come and shit in our restrooms. Let me ask you this, if they know they have a certain amount on their card, how come they can’t add that shit up as they shop?”
“That is the appeal of the ten for ten sales, and for that matter dollars stores, Bro,” I sagely answered. “But still, even shopping three at a time they can only count up to thirty—then you’re into multiplication. That’s like asking me to build a space ship by six a.m.”
Steevo was now casting disparaging glances down the aisle at a gay couple. The flamer was a muscular black male of 20, who wore tight designer torn jeans and a plush white shirt knotted just above his nipples. Steeve groused under his breath, “The fuckin’ zombie apocalypse needs to hit—real zombies, the kind that will eat these fuckers!”
He groaned softly and hung his head as the male slut began skipping toward us. He then replaced the pudding packs that the welfare people who could not count would have to live without as I stocked the French onion dip, and got back to the original topic, “Dude, seriously, how hard can simple addition be?”
The flaming gay man-doll of glistening ebony skipped by Steevo in a slow sashaying way and lisped, “One plus one equal two. Two plus one equal three, three plus one equal four…”
Steevo’s eyes bugged out of his head as he snarked, “I feel much better knowing that that faɡɡot can count how many dicks go up his ass! The way he swings that thing he probably knows his multiplication tables too.”
The most interesting customers of the night were handled by Tia, my personal wallet-blocker, who protects this author from the nefarious wiles of sluts of all describe. That story will be told as an installment of Your Trojan Whorse. Look out for Tia and the Ho-Train.
James, here in the west a billionaire has taken the reins of intermountain power company, old guys are rushing to retire while they can, the service is getting worse, there is no loyalty to the company because they are cutting costs to help pay the dividends out to the share holders as Hunter Thompson once said Big Darkness comes soon.
The worst part of the collapse of a civilization might be the part right before. You have to deal with all these people and you can't, you know, DEAL with them. And it can go on for quite a long time until the Huns show up.
Sounds like you're working and living on a sinking ship. Water pails are out and you're bailing fast. Let it sink, just get off the boat while you can. Unless you're the captain.