1 Apr
My Walmart = Teh Fail
Today I’d like to educate you about what my local Walmart is the WORST Walmart in the chain.
I’ll be presenting you a series of stories that will illustrate how my Walmart experience is almost never a positive one in Columbia City, Indiana.
I’ve been contemplating writing this blog entry for some time now. Most of the times I will run in to a nice employee at this Walmart and then I feel guilty about coming home and bitching about this store but finally I’ve had enough.
Sit down, prepare yourself to hear my rants and raves about our Walmart and enjoy my woes.
Recently I went in to Walmart at about 11pm at night. I often hit Walmart at this time to purchase Nintendo Wii games. Hell I even bought my first Nintendo Wii at this Walmart location one night at about midnight. I get done working on work stuff and need something to help me unwind so I head to Walmart and find myself a Nintendo Wii game.
One night while doing this I went to the electronics section and noticed some new gaming magazines. One of which caught my eye so I picked it up and checked it over to see if it was something that I’d be interested in purchasing.
I started to put in back in the holder when a police officer and a store employee approached me.
At first I was glad to see the store employee… I was going to purchase three Nintendo Wii games and they keep them locked up so she could get them out for me so I could buy them.
She had a mean look on her face though. She approached me and asked to see my ID. I declined and told her I didn’t have it with me. Why would she need to see my ID? I hadn’t yet asked to purchase any games and when I did I would have gladly provided it. Right now I was simply looking at various items.
What she doesn’t realize is that I am a young adult. As such I have what we call a disposable income. I many times will spend my hard earned cash on video games, sodas, and other things that won’t really mean jack in a few years.
I digress, the police officer approached me and then asked me for ID. Knowing my rights I declined. It was about this time that I decided to leave the Walmart and take my purchase elsewhere.
I started to head for the door of the Walmart fully expecting the police officer to have more police officers in the area ready to pull me over for no reason (that is how my town police rolls).
I didn’t make it to the door however. The employee stopped me again and said if I didn’t show her my ID she would have me arrested. I said that I would not.
She then told me I needed to leave the Walmart. As I began to tell her that was what I intended the police officer approached and said he would be handcuffing me if I didn’t leave right now.
At the time I was two days away from entering the Indiana State Police academy so I didn’t want any trouble and agreed to leave. I would have honestly agreed to leave anyways because I am NOT a trouble maker and never have been.
The employee stops me again on my way to the door. She tells me if I let her see my ID and I can prove that I am at least 18 I can stay in the store. That Columbia City has a curfew and Walmart enforces it. I tell her I am twenty-two years old, that I am the President of the local company and that I am highly offended. She tells me to “get the fuck out”.
I leave the Walmart.
The next morning I call Walmart and ask to speak with the manager. I ask for her specifically by name and when she will not take my call I leave a message saying that I will call back again the next day.
The next day I call back again. I finally get a hold of her and tell her my story and that I would never shop at Walmart again. At least not her Walmart and that I was considering calling her District Manager and reporting my story.
She was actually a kind soul and I couldn’t be terribly mad at her because of the actions of a rouge employee. She explained to me that it is not Walmart’s policy to enforce the city curfew because Walmart is a private business and not the police.
I couldn’t agree more with her assessment of the situation and she assures me that it will be fixed.
Regardless of the case I stay away from that Walmart for a period of time.
My fiancee loves Walmart sadly. Granted she was mad when I told her what happened but she claims it is the only place to shop in our town. Which is true… we could always go ten minutes up the road to the next town where a great deal of stores are but she won’t do that.
So we start going to the worst Walmart in the chain again. The Columbia City Walmart.
This particular Walmart store even before the ID incident wasn’t my favorite store in the world.
It is almost always horribly dirty. You will often see huge stains on the floor, spilled product, leaks and water coming down from the ceiling, the bathroom if often a mess, the merchandise is often in shambles and doesn’t look like it has been front-faced or laser-lined in weeks, the items you get from the bakery are often old, hard, and crusty the day you get them and the store is almost always out of stock of the most basic items.
I already am not a fan of Walmart. If I have to shop at a Walmart store though I’ll go out of my way to go to another store in the chain because many times the selection and environment is just better.
Not my fiancee though. She is just another blind consumer. Sigh.
Meaning we of course return to the worst Walmart in the chain often because she likes to be a blind consumer and doesn’t care how shitty the place is because the prices are good (not really that good though).
Finally this past week she started to see what I’ve been saying for months about this Walmart. She started to get angry and taking it out on me. Which of course just let to a large argument and later my typing of this blog entry to get my stress out.
The other day we went in with a very simple shopping list.
As we began shopping we noticed they didn’t have any sugar in stock. Not a big deal.
Then we begin to look for salt, Coke, and a plethora of other basic items and found them to be out of stock on nearly everything. Tiffany started to get very frustrated.
I try not to let it frustrate me… everything about Walmart is already a huge frustration for me. Especially this Walmart.
In the end we weren’t able to get over 30 items on our shopping list.
The people at the Columbia City Walmart as I’ve already said are horribly unprofessional as this week proved to me once again.
We went to a self-checkout lane. Apparently the lady who was using it before us only got one item. She realized she forgot milk at the back of the store and took her one item and left the self-checkout to get her milk. We didn’t know this of course, walk up and scan our first item. Ten seconds later the lady watching over the self-checkouts comes over and says… “You should look next time someone may be using it”. I thought WHAT THE FUCK. I can think of no reason at all for her to be such a bitch over nothing.
So we started putting our items in the bag and she came over and asked us to stop and before saying anything more voids our transaction and tells us to move to another lane because “this one was already being used”.
Uhhhh. Okay?!?
So we move to the one next to it and I make a remark to Tiffany about how much Walmart sucks and what a bitch that lady was not knowing she was right behind me. She gets mad and voids our transaction and tells us to go to a regular checkout lane.
Even better on the way out we are stopped and our bags searched.
Yeah Walmart in Columbia City… its great… let me tell you 
The people aren’t the worst thing though. Our Walmart is the DIRTIEST you are going to find in the chain. We’ve seen and taken pictures of roaches and even rats in our Walmart in the past week. We made some calls to a few insepectors and the good news is Walmart has one week to fix it…. or get closed. Which of course makes me happy.
They somehow passed the inspection yesterday… at least as far as the infestation goes and now they are in trouble because the roof is falling in and has tons of holes in it.
Nothing makes me feel better about shopping then having to avoid tripping over buckets every other isle that catch the water coming in from the roof.
Again… my Walmart is the win…. oh wait… teh fail. My bad.
Don’t post a comment telling me to stop shopping at this local Walmart because I already have. I know I should have a long time ago but getting Tiffany to stop… it hasn’t been easy. Even after I got escorted out for shopping “after curfew”.
