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Wal-Mart
Category: Shopping Department Stores Shopping Fashion Department Stores Department Stores [Edit]
86 West StGrinnell, IA 50112
(641) 236-4999
- Price Range:
-
$
- Accepts Credit Cards:
- Yes
- Wheelchair Accessible:
- Yes
One review for Wal-Mart
1 review in English
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Review from Ben P.
San Francisco, CA
1/15/2008
When people ask me to list the things I don't miss about living in the Midwest, I never think of Wal-Mart soon enough to add it to the list in the appropriate level of importance.
Let's get this out of the way quickly: I appreciate that not everyone is rich. There need to be places where people of limited means can go to buy products of moderate quality for reasonable prices. Wal-Mart fills that niche.
I'm not going to object to Wal-Mart's mom-and-pop-business-killing effects. Frankly, many (though not all) of the stores that go out of business when Wal-Mart opens nearby are crappy stores in the first place. I'm not going to object to the marginal quality of goods at Wal-Mart, because their customers all know what they're buying when they enter the store.
Instead, I'm going to ask one simple question about my fellow Wal-Mart shoppers (or, to be more accurate, those personages who were my fellow Wal-Mart shoppers when I had no alternative but to shop at Wal-Mart): who the hell raised these people?
Never have I seen more shirtless men walking around in a non-beach-related environment, shopping for car parts like it is a perfectly rational thing to leave your house and walk about in public with no shirt on.
Never have I seen more toddlers wearing only a diaper (that's right, no shoes) trundle around in public, alternately sticking their hand in their mouth and then wiping said hand on whatever's in reach.
Never have I seen more stretchy stirrup pants in such a dazzling array of pastel colors.
Never have I seen so many Yosemite Sam mudflaps. Okay, okay: I'll git back, as you request. Just put away the guns!
And I'm not just some kind of uppity snob whose high-brow ways simply prevent him from enjoying the salt-of-the-earth joys of walking around in public without a shirt on accompanied by a mostly naked 17-month old and a wife wearing fuchsia stretchy stirrup pants. Having spent time in life as someone with essentially no money, then someone with a little money, then someone with some money, and eventually someone who's radically overpaid, I can safely report that at no time (including when I didn't have $8 to my name) did it ever occur to me to go grocery shopping nekkid from the waist up (something all of you can take comfort in, because it's not a pretty sight).
Wal-Mart, I shall not miss your cheap goods nor your endless cavalcade of naked humanity.
Target, here I come.
