I've been thinking about getting a fan to put in the room with Sarah so she doesn't have to listen to all the noise that goes on above her at night. (Noisy neighbors mean less sleep for baby) Last night, since I had to go out anyway to fill a prescription, I decided to stop by the new Wal-Mart near us.
It was about 2 minutes after 10 and the door said they had closed already, but the door opened. I went in and asked the first person I saw if they were really closed.
"We closed at ten," the less-than-friendly door greeter replied.
"No no! We're open until eleven" a woman said from behind me. "They just told us about 15 minutes ago."
Strange, I thought, but this is Wal-Mart and as long as I can go get a fan, I guess it doesn't really matter when the decided to stay open. So I asked these two people where I would be most likely to find a fan.
They sent me to housewares, and the lady working in that department sent me to the pharmacy department. They sent me to the sporting goods department, where they had battery operated fans, but no plug in types. They sent me to hardware, but having been all over the store I decided not to trust them. My own search yielded an aisle designated as "Heating and Cooling." I wonder why no one knew it was there!
This aisle was full of heater fans and other space heater type things. No regular plain old fans.
I asked a nearby associate, who happened to have a whole palette full of likely appliances, if there was any chance of finding a regular fan. I explained that I just wanted a little noise for my daughter so she didn't have to wake up with every footstep over her head. She brought out a giant box fan and an oscillating fan on a stand.
I thanked her for her trouble and went back to the heating aisle where I perused the heating fans once more. Most of them boasted that they were 'whisper quiet'. I didn't really believe that, but I didn't want to take the chance that someone actually managed to figure out how to remove the wind noise from a $15 fan, so I kept looking. Finally I found a heater fan that you could just turn the fan on with out the heat. And it was only $9!!
A trip that should have taken only a few minutes ate up half an hour. If you haven't already learned this lesson on your own, I'd like to let you in on a secret: Wal-Mart employees don't know where anything is. They might tell you with great confidence and authority where you can find what you are looking for but, as Sam put it, they aren't paid enough to actually know.
2 comments:
Sometimes, as I check out, the cashier has the nerve to ask, "Did you find everything alright?"
"No," I reply, "but does it matter?"
She shrugs and looks uncomfortable because, of course, it doesn't matter.
I always get asked that too, and I wonder: If I gave her a list of all the things I couldn't find or spent too much time looking for, would she write it down and tell someone who could do something about it? I doubt it!
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