The WalMart Dilemna

When you are poor you become very familiar with WalMart.

It is Mecca, the Emerald City. The Shining Beacon on the hill. You are drawn to it and if you are to survive you must heed the call.

I hate WalMart.

My entire life in Chicago when I was making good money I managed to avoid WalMart. I did my discount shopping at "Tar-jhay" and that was as low as I would go thank you very much. Groceries were bought at Whole Foods where I could browse the olive bar and much samples of orange cranberry scones as I shopped. Electronics came from Best Buy, pads of paper and ink cartriges came from Office Max and clothes? Well they came from Nordstrom, Fields and J.Jill. The shopping choices were lush and with an American Express Gold Card and the cash to back it up at the end of the month, I tell you the living was easy.

Now everything (and I do mean everything) comes from WalMart.

It's become a Sunday morning pilgrimage. Why Sunday morning? Because in a quiet, religious town like Las Cruces, Sunday morning is the only reasonable time to shop there. Any other time of the week there are too many people, too many kids, too many carts blocking the aisles and too much noise.

Upon entering and taking a cart from the greeter I usually turn to the left and head for the grocery section. Our WalMart is a Supercenter so they have a full grocery department. And that is the root of why I feel compelled to shop there. Their prices are ridiculously low. Much lower than the regular grocery store. The same goes for "drugstore" items like toothpaste and Tylenol. Name brands are lower in price and if you opt for Great Value or Equate, the WalMart house brands you will really save money.

I know how they do it. CNBC had a great two-hour documentary on WalMart a few years ago. They use their size and reputation as leverage to force suppliers to give them huge discounts at the wholesale level. They're paying a lot less for that pallette of Tide than your neighborhood grocery store is. They are a lean, mean discounting machine and they are famous for wiping out every small company in its way. People who've lived here a while say they used to have several grocery stores from which to choose. Now only Albertsons hangs on to challenge them.

Now there are some items that WalMart doesn't carry that I can get at Albertsons but they are mostly expensive specialty items and I've pretty much cut them out of my diet like any good poor person would. Also, I refuse to buy meat there. They carry the lowest quality available for human consumption and that is where I draw the line. I'd rather eat less meat which is what I am doing.

Back inside the store I do my grocery shopping first. The produce is so so but no better or worse than Albertsons. We have a farmers market on Wednesdays and Saturdays but it's more crafts and chile peppers than anything else. So I may buy some fresh fruits and vegetables but only if I'm sure I'm going to use them right away. With the small amounts that I eat I'm better off with frozen veggies and these days they're just as nutritionally sound as fresh.

I avoid the bakery and the deli. The bakery has strange oversweetened pastries with bright pink and turquoise icing and forget about buying bagels. The closest decent bagel is at a deli I found in Truth or Consequences NM and that's about 75 miles away.

So I buy my basics. Pasta, cheese, eggs, cereal, condiments...at ridiculously low prices.

And then it's time to peruse the rest of the store.

You should know that there are very few things you can't get at WalMart. This is one of the things that makes it so appealing. One stop shopping. So I start walking around the store and into the cart with the peanut butter and the Cheerios go things like a ream of printer paper, a mixing bowl, a couple of garden plants and a yellow hoodie.

Yes it's come to that. I'll admit it. I have bought clothing at WalMart. I got a pair of jeans there about a year ago and I love them. It's my little inside joke when I wear them with my expensive Sigrid Olsen sweaters (from better times). They cost me $15. Before I went on my cruise I found a pair of plain black flats for $10 that I spruced up with some rhinestone shoe clips I bought on Ebay.

So as much as it goes against my social consience to shop there, it has become a necessity in order to preserve what little money I have to live on.