amassed lust Blog of Raymond Angel; Startup Enthusiast, CEO

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”.

A lot of people have been talking about all of the hype surrounding WordPress 2.5 and how amazing it is going to be with the new design and all of the new features.

A lot of people have also been talking about how much they hate certain aspects of WordPress 2.5

Most of the complaints have been about the WordPress 2.5 ‘Write Post’ page which I will of course speak about later in this post I find that I have far more complaints.

The first one being the new “Widget” section of WordPress 2.5. I have mixed feelings about this section. I find that I myself understand it but when I was showing it to people who are not experienced bloggers they were confused for a good thirty seconds before they understood it.

I know a lot of people who aren’t very computer savvy and yet still blog. The majority of them use TypePad which is a great product if you are just starting but one that isn’t known for a lot of customizable power.

One feature that every person I know that uses TypePad enjoys is the way TypePad handles themes for blogging. It has an easy to use drag-and-drop interface. You want a widget moved up or down on your sidebar? Easy enough… drag it from the bin and move it around on the sidebar until you find the place you want it.

For a long time it was the same thing with WordPress. You could easily drag and drop the items you wanted to and from the sidebar and then up or down.

The new setup is just confusing to those who are just starting.

In the original pre 2.5 setup you would select the items you wanted and drag them to either sidebar 1 or sidebar 2 and sometimes if your design had it even a third or fourth sidebar. This was intuitive.

I always, always, always use people that I know aren’t savvy with technology to test ideas on. I brought in a few of those people such as my mother and some friends to sit down and attempt to use the old WordPress and then the “new” WordPress and then observed as much as I could to make sure I wasn’t just plain crazy on this.

In the first situation I sat my mom down with 2.5 and asked her to move some items around on my sidebar. She was able to determine she wanted the design system and once she understood what the word widget meant that the widget section is the part she wanted.

My mother has used TypePad because I wrote a major book about the platform. Her first attempt was to drag and drop what she wanted to the sidebar. It didn’t work. After about 25 seconds she realized she had to click the Add buton.

Next I told her I wanted the widget to below the comments widget and so she started looking for the ability to do so. Again she wasted about 20 seconds to find that she could drag and drop the items up or down.

She was confused as to why she could drag and drop on one section but not another.

Which basically had proven my initial thoughts that the new design for handling widgets in your theme is a blunder. They don’t stop with that though.

I have a great deal of posts set as drafts at any given time. I often start having thoughts about a blog post but because of the nature of my job will need to stop writing and take care of something. One feature I love is the ability to simply hit Write and then have my drafts appear at the top so I can click them and keep working on them later.

In 2.5 that is no longer possible.

To get to a draft you actually click the drafts link on the dashboard.

This actually makes more sense to have all my drafts show up in one place and will most likely prove to be beneficial to newer bloggers and less tech savvy individuals but it will require an adjustment on my part and I know I’ll get used to the new way in time.
Everyone had issues with the Write Post page. When I read all of the negative blogs I was assuming that they simply didn’t like change and that the new layout couldn’t be that bad.

Again… mixed feelings with this section.

The new design is much more focused on the actual writing process and less so on the meta and additional tasks that goes with writing a blog entry. I assume this is because a lot of users don’t modify WordPress and simply just use it to post quick entries.

For power users such as myself who make sure each post has a tag, often times add custom fields and other various meta information I find the new layout to require more clicks and as such time consuming and awful to an extent.

Honestly though this is another issue that I think given a bit of time will become a non-issue as I slowly adjust my WordPress habits.

A great deal of complaints have also been focused at the navigation and tabs at the top of the admin panel. I personally have no complaints with the new setup. The new tabs are simplified, the process of moving from one task to another seems more logical and the design overall seems easier for a new user to pick up and begin using.

The new color scheme feels a bit like a Six Apart product and I’m not sure I approve of that
The colors are pleasant and easy on the eyes but after a long period of time writing the same post (such as this one) it gets old quickly and doesn’t feel like home as the old scheme did. The good news is that plugins will be able to change the color scheme and I’ve heard rumors that you can revert back to classic in the settings but I’ve yet to see that option if it even really exists.

The new dashboard actually makes a great deal of sense and I haven’t seen or heard many complaints about it as of yet but I’m sure some elitist will have something negative to say.

Overall my first impression of WordPress 2.5 is mixed. I think a fresh new look is required but I’m not sure that the changes are going to make blogging easier for newer users as the design firm behind it claim.

Who knows… maybe I’m an idiot who knows nothing of blogging though.

June is coming… and that means my wedding is quickly coming.

Wedding registries have been a big part that Tiffany has been working on. Recently we went to Kohls and took care of our registry. We have a lot of friends that LOVE LOVE LOVE Kohls and we both admit they have some great merchandise that we wanted to have on our wedding registry.

So we drove an hour away to our nearest Kohls store and setup a registry account.

The Manager asked for our drivers licenses for collateral so we could take the scanner and select the merchandise we wanted for our registry.

Four hours later we finally had completed our albeit short list. We double checked that the items we wanted were appearing on the scanner and then went back to the desk to get our IDs back.

About twenty minutes later because they had “missplaced” our licesnces (aka lost them!!!) we finally get our IDs back and after another series of interogations about finding everything we wanted they said it would appear online in about an hour.

We went out for dinner and drove the hour long trip back.

We spent about 8 hours of that day working on the registry. I actually took the day off for this specific task.

Leave it to a HORRIBLE retailer like Kohls to destory and waste all of that time.

Earlier today Tiffany called with an almost panic in her voice.

She went online to check our registry as she had prepared the invitations with information about our registry at Kohls.

When she got online what did she find… our wedding registry was totally and completly blank. Not a single item on it.

Yup… that is right… we wasted eight hours, I took a day off from work, we got our IDs nearly stolen by Kohls and we had our invitations already printed with information about being registered at Kohls only to find out Kohls has no information.

Moral of the story: Don’t waste your time with Kohls.

P.S

I’m forwarding information about this blog to Kohl’s. Will see if I get any response (highly unlikely).

P.S.S

We will NEVER shop at Kohls again and I’m taking the day off tomorrow to go register at Target.

Over the past few weeks Patrick and I have been talking about a plethora of business things.

He will be doing a presentation at SXSW this year to promote his book and he asked me if I knew of any good places to go for business cards.

I can now safely tell him two places to not go.

The first one is Overnight Prints. I just had a long-time friend use them and the cards were horrible. The print on them was misaligned and they needed these cards for a meeting with a VC. So yeah… not cool.

The second place is my own experience. Before heading off to Startup Weekend I realized that I was nearly out of business cards. In a bind I visited the online arm of Staples and saw they do business cards that you can send the design for online and then pickup in store.

So of course knowing I was in a tight spot with under a week I ordered 200 cards online. The quality can’t be that bad… could it?

I WAS DEAD WRONG.

I know that it is my fault for the most part seeing as how I could have ordered cards in advance and got them done somewhere local (more on that to come) but I’ve been really busy as of late working on closing something major for the company and haven’t had time to watch my “business card stock levels” very closely.

Onward with the point of this post though… which is to show you the “quality” you can expect at Staples.

I didn’t get the more expensive card stock because the site actually recommended the regular stock. I assumed the stock wouldn’t be all that bad… it isn’t… but it isn’t that great either.

The cards are TERRIBLE. Staples is TERRIBLE. The cards had the most piss poor cut I’ve ever seen.

See that white line at the top of the card? Yeah that is the way they cut it, boxed it, then sold it to me. Not all cards are like this but out of 200 cards a great deal of them had quite simply piss poor cuts.

I suspected the cutting would be terrible so I specifically asked for black card stock. That way if the cut was a terrible shitty cut it wouldn’t stick out as much.

If they were going to make the cards on white stock then why even bother offering the black stock?

The printing and cutting was horribly aligned on almost all of the cards, the color was inconsistent from one card to the next,  and when I ordered online I paid for 200 and it said they were giving me another 100 free because of a promotion. Did I get the extra 100 free? Nope… and when I asked later for them they told me that promo only applied if I asked for it when picking up.

Think about this for a second… if I asked at pickup they would have had to make the extra 100 cards. Does that make any sense? Why not just make the extra 100 instead of making just the 200 and then if I want to actually get what the site promised me not make me wait another few hours just to get another hundred cards.

Shit.

I’m going to tell EVERYONE I know that Staples for business cards is the BIGGEST mistake you can make. Even in emergency situations where you just need something to get you through they make the shittiest of the shity cards.