Wal Mart - The Next Borders?

I don't go to Wal-Mart much. Mostly because it's like Black Friday every day when I go there. I know it saves me nearly 30 additional cents on every ten dollars I spend, but it just isn't worth it for me to stand in line for 45 minutes so I can buy a gallon of milk for $5.19 instead of $5.29.

Also, every time I go there I witness something weird. I just don't like being there. Today of course I walked up and down the length of checkout lines hoping that I would find one without either 40 people standing in it waiting to purchase their goods, or with one person pulling two carts filled with items from every corner of the store. Either way, I know my precious day will be wasted standing in line. As it was I ended up spending 10 minutes searching for the line which I felt offered the shortest wait only to have the cashier drop a bottle of febreeze over the scanner and have it explode. The aisle filled with the scent of lavender and lilies and his scanner was ruined.

Sigh.

But because the missus needs some storage containers for her burgeoning stained glass empire and I couldn't think of any place else in town that not only has them, but has aisles dedicated to them. As I wondered through the store I thought I wouldn't mind checking out the latest season of the best show on TV (PSYCH , if you must know) and their DVD shelves were almost totally empty.  Like, nothing there at all. Seems weird to me to have aisles full of nothing. I wondered around there store some more, looking for other signs of spare real estate.

Wal-Mart: The gold standard in retail

I found some. (Edit - an actual picture taken by me today btw) I can't help but scratch my head and wonder if the fine folks that used to work at my local - soon to be bankrupt - Borders that used to present me with empty shelves there took over at Wal-Mart.

Borders: Those shelves don't seem so empty to me now

Empty shelves amaze me. I can see running out of an unexpectedly hot product, or having a supply truck break down, a vendor fail... that sort of stuff happens. But having entire aisles being empty confounds me to no end. How is that possible? Especially knowing at least a little of how Wal-Mart's supply chain works I can only imagine they had a complete meltdown somewhere.

Anyway, empty shelves don't seem to deter the crowds. It was packed in there like a rock concert. I can only guess it makes the crowd want to hurry up and buy everything else that isn't tied down before it disappears. It's like what my father used to tell me about how he would sell candy bars door to door when he was a kid. He would hid all the candy bars except for a couple and go knock on the door with a near empty box and tell the homeowner that he just needed to sell the last couple and he would be done. If he is to be believed then it worked like a charm.

So who knows, maybe they're geniuses.

Anyhow, time to get back to work on my crappy novel.