So I have been having a bit of an irritable day today. I really don't know what sparked it but some things that normally don't bother me were really annoying me today, especially this afternoon and evening. Perhaps it was the fact that my American history prof was out of town for a family funeral and had a different prof (Dr. Naylor) sit in to give us a quiz that turned out to be less of a quiz and more of an in class, closed book essay. I gave him all I had in my head but it wasn't quite enough, it seemed. Perhaps I should have read all of the assigned reading!
After I got home I decided that today was a good day to bake a cake and was considering going to the grocery store to buy a cake-mix and take it home to bake it up. After thinking of it a while I decided that I wanted to buy the new Jack Johnson CD at Wal-Mart and then I would drive all the way to the other end of town to get a cake-mix. On the way to Wal-Mart the thought occurred to me that these new Wal-Mart stores have more than the usual Wal-Mart junk. They now have groceries and would likely have the cake-mix that I was looking for.
Now, before I go any further I must say that the only reason why I go to Wal-Mart to buy anything is because it seems that they have the best price in town. Other than that I despise the place from the depth of my heart and soul.
Today, Wal-Mart gave me no good reason to change my mind. As I entered the store I was greeted by an aura that said, "Here I am. I have a lot of everything and nothing of anything". I began to search for the electronics/music department of the store to look for my coveted Jack Johnson recording. I started at one end of the store and began walking around the perimeter searching for electronics. The irritation was growing by the second. Wherever I looked there were shelves full of the usual low quality Wal-Mart crap. Does one place really need to sell all of this stuff? As usual, what I was looking for was in the last place I looked. It happened to be right in the middle of the store, right where I remembered the electronics sections to be in all the other modern Wal-Mart’s I had visited.
After searching for a little while I eventually found the Jack Johnson CD I wanted. It wasn't in a place where I would have logically thought it might be. Stupid Wal-Mart. Stupid electronics section. Stupid store that wants to be everything to everyone.
After finding the CD I decided that instead of buying the CD and then going to get my cake-mix I would instead go get the cake-mix and ice cream and pay for that and the cake mix at the same time. Off to the edible section of Wally's World. What a joke. If I thought that finding the electronics section was irritating this was worse by far. After walking around the grocery section for what I thought was an eternity I finally found the cake-mix section. Guess what? The regular price for cake-mix here was cheaper than the sales price at Sobey's.
Now it was decision time. What flavour of cake was I going to buy? Initially, what I wanted to buy was a plain old vanilla cake-mix. Could I find it? Not a stinking chance. There was chocolate, mint, dark chocolate, nearly a dozen different varieties in total (ok, I might be making some of this up). The closest thing that I found to plain old vanilla was something called "French Vanilla". If I wanted French Vanilla cake I would move to France. What is so difficult about stocking Vanilla cake-mix? Surely, if you are trying to be all things to all you people you would stock the basics first and then get extravagant once you have achieved the basics.
I settled on the French Vanilla.
After finding the cake-mix I was pondering whether I would have whipped cream or ice cream with it. I searched for quite some time and I could not find anything that resembled nutri-whip. I made some sort of a caustic comment to a fellow shopper that kind of went like this, "This place sells everything but what you are looking for." She seemed to think that I was making a joke of it because she laughed. Oh well, even if I am deeply irritated I still have the ability to make middle-aged women laugh. That has to count for something.
So whipped cream was obviously out of the picture. The decision was made. I would be eating ice cream with my French Vanilla cake. Off to the frozen food section to seek out ice cream. Happily for me they did have plain vanilla ice cream in stock. I would not need to settle for "French Vanilla" ice cream. (By the way, what do the French know about vanilla anyway? I would much sooner trust the Swiss.) I reached into the freezer to get my pail of ice cream and to my annoyance I found that the Wal-Mart ice cream doesn't have handles on the pails. What good is an ice cream pail with out the handle? Oh well, I reached into the freezer and picked out my pail of ice cream and walking back to the electronics cradled the ice cream and cake-mix under my arm. I picked out my much anticipated Jack Johnson CD (actually the soundtrack for the movie,
Curious George) paid for it and my grocery purchase at electronics and went home.
I was fully disgusted with Wal-Mart and I think I will be shopping at different stores in the future. I will buy my bread where they specialize in baking bread, like maybe the Prairie Grain Bakery. I will buy my ammunition at a place where they know guns and hunting (Brett at the Homebuilding Centre knows his stuff). I will go to Sobey's when I need groceries.
To add insult to injury, when I finally got home and baked the cake I was thoroughly disgusted by the taste of the ice cream. It seems to have an extremely salty taste to it. Yuck!!
Thus ends my rant at Wal-Mart. I realize that I have just typed up an extremely long entry and have said nothing, really. It has helped, to an extent, to rant about my frustrations of the day. I am now ready to sign off on the day and go to bed. Good night.
