Readers and writers blog

I don’t go shopping very much, but I wound up the other day at our local Wal-Mart. I wish I hadn’t.

I would have preferred to go somewhere else to get an iPod MP3 player, a birthday gift for my wife, but the only outlet for Apple products in our neck of suburbia is Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart has such a poor reputation both for its business practices — pressuring its vendors for such low prices that manufacturing jobs get sent overseas — and for its treatment of employees, forcing unpaid overtime and paying so little for regular hours that a one-earner family lives well below the poverty line. It’s come a long way down since Sam Walton ran the place.

And me, a retired union member, patronizing what Wal-Mart has become. But it was too late to order through the Internet. And that iPod — recommended to me as the best choice — would make it so much nicer for my wife at her job, where she works on a sometimes-stalled computer and would like to listen to music while she waits. And she works hard. And she’s so close to retirement that she deserves all the comfort she can get.

And so I went.

The parking lot at the local Wal-Mart overlooks the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, which still have the same beauty that Thomas Cole and Frederic Church saw when they painted them more than a century ago. The store, on the other hand, appropriately fits the expression ‘big-box.’

And when did people start hanging out at the entrances of mall stores? I can’t remember when they stopped hanging out on downtown street corners and moved to the mall. (And when did I start sounding like Andy Rooney?)

The atmosphere inside the Wal-Mart was not happy. The customer herd was roaming loose, foraging for employees for assistance. One of the employees was standing on a huge Wal-Mart ladder, fixing something on the Wal-Mart ceiling. Others rushed to and fro, meeting some invisible schedule. The iPods were behind lock and key, and the young woman who let mine out looked more like a corrections officer.

It was sad. So I took my goods and got out.

As I was driving into town for another errand, I came to a stop sign where a young, bewhiskered man, wearing old military clothes, held a sign identifying himself as unemployed and homeless. He didn’t look like a grifter. Because when the woman in front of me rolled down her window and handed him a bottle of water and a box of crackers — I don’t know why she had them handy — he broke into a smile, put the water to his lips and began to open the crackers.

All I had was a debit card and an iPod. I drove on past, feeling guilty.

I visited an ATM during my errand and drove back to that intersection to give the guy a couple of bucks. He was gone. And I felt worse.

On the way home, I stopped at another intersection — a three-way where everybody stops — and gave hand signals for the guy to my left to move through ahead of me, but he was too busy on his cell phone to notice.

The trip wasn’t a total loss. In my 15-mile itinerary, I got tailgated only once, and he was an old guy peering over the top of his steering wheel, so he’s entitled.

What makes me the saddest about my trip is that most of us allow ourselves — myself included — to be drawn into Wal-Mart by its low prices and big product line at the expense of some of us who end up working there. Or end up not working at all.

When I saw that the homeless guy had moved on, an ironic image flashed through my mind — him applying for a job at Wal-Mart. Well, I thought, he’d be better off. Just not much.

– Sid Leavitt