Adventures at Walmart

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Adventures at Walmart

                Earlier tonight, I went to Walmart to buy some supplies in order to make a model brain for AP Psychology.  At first, I had imagined that I would get a styrofoam head and shoulders, and then cut open the head and somehow make a brain to put inside.  However, these apparently don’t exist, so I decided I would settle for a plain styrofoam ball, but this also didn’t work out, because there weren’t any of reasonable size to represent a head.  In the end, I bought six small tubs of play-doh to mold the brain by hand.

                During the time between taking the play-doh off the shelf and getting back into the car, I developed a hypothesis as to why some people are tempted to shoplift.  I had always thought that these people had backwards morals, thought they would get away with it, had a serious shortage of cash, and such.  Many people probably do steal for these reasons, but tonight I learned another possible reason, and that is lack of unlimited patience.  It was only about 7:30, and as Walmart is a twenty-four-hour store anyway, there was no reason behind their excessive slowness.

                The five or six open checkout lanes in the entire store were totally packed, so my mom and I went to one of the two open self-checkout lanes.  There were about eight in the area, but God forbid one of those lazy-ass workers would have to go through the labor of opening another.  Everyone knows that those self-checkout machines are pieces of trash that need constant maintenance and never work without assistance, and this particular employee was taking full advantage of it. 

                There were two half-naked riff-raff stoners in front of us, and they literally needed help after scanning each one of their fifty to sixty items.  This female employee seized her opportunity to flirt with them during each one of these encounters, which I wouldn’t have even noticed if my mom hadn’t pointed it out to me.  She also brought up another great point.  The comment she made was only half-sarcastic:  “This is the reason why people steal.”  Just the amount of time wasted in line to purchase goods may be enough of a reason for some people to justify their shoplifting.  The sad thing is that I don’t blame them.  It was absolutely excruciating.  To top it off, once it was finally our turn, the girl gave us rolled her eyes and gave us nothing but sass when the machine acted up for us.