MUSINGS FROM THE MIND OF AMANDA

So, I’m 47 years old, and I think I’m doing ok…got the house and the car and the husband and the kid and the pets (SO MANY PETS) and a church family and a good job, but there are still some things I wonder about.

I wonder why people think it’s ok to walk down the center aisle of the Walmart parking lot without moving out of the way of the ginormous Chevrolet Subdivision behind them. I wonder why people don’t realize you can tell which way to drive by looking at the direction of the slanted lines that mark parking spots. I also wonder why there are so many birds in the parking lot. Who feeds those things? Also, I wonder why some people think it’s ok to leave their spawn’s dirty diaper in a shopping cart. And where on earth do people get enough confidence in drivers to just walk straight out of the store into the parking lot without even looking to see if anything is coming.

I wonder even more when I get inside. I wonder why people think the middle of the aisle is the place to hold family reunions. I wonder if maybe they don’t have cable tv or streaming and that’s why they’ve brought their 11 feral children to Walmart. I wonder if they home school and that’s why they and the pack are at Walmart at ten o’clock on a Tuesday night. I wonder if I should direct them to condom aisle.

I wonder if Walmart branded meat products are the same as the name brand ones. Does Walmart get the “special” cows? Am I less likely to be eating horse nipples if I buy Wolf brand chili instead of Great Value? Or does it matter and it’s all from the glue factory rejects? I just don’t know.

I don’t know who decides what clothes to sell. Sometimes it’s cute. Sometimes it’s a prairie dress with neon patterns that I wouldn’t use to clean the dog crate. And how do they get all the local team t-shirts? My high school had less than five hundred students, but Walmart (and Dollar General) still had their t-shirts. And now you can buy designer stuff from Walmart’s website. How does THAT work? Are these “irregular” items? Returns from the fancy places? Will we see an episode of the Kardashians where one of those weirdos brags about saving $50 by ordering their Ballenciaga merch from Walmart? (I won’t see it, because I wouldn’t watch them unless they paid me, and they’d have to pay me enough to order stuff from the REAL websites, not Walmart.)

I wonder what the cashiers think about self checkout and using the app to check out. I used to be a cashier. If someone had told me customers could check themselves out and leave me out of it, I would’ve kissed ’em right on the lips. Being a cashier sucks. A man dropped three fifty pound bags of kitty litter on my hands once. I don’t know why he did that, either, so add it to the list, I guess. I wonder if the ones who pick items for customer pickup ever pick really crappy stuff on purpose. Like maybe they take the onion from the bottom that’s bruised and missing half it’s skin, and maybe got used as a kickball by a couple of the feral children from the paragraph above instead of the pristine one on top because they recognize the customer’s name, and that customer wouldn’t let them go tradesies on dessert in fourth grade? The town I live in is small enough that it would be a possibility.

I guess none of these things really matter (except the horse nipple meat. That matters) I guess I’ll never know.

:-)