Now I’ll admit Wal Mart tends to get me miffed quite a bit, with their continuous shuffling of their inventory from aisle A to aisle Z, or the extremely annoying habit of carrying item X for the last 10 years, and no longer offering item X anymore. How about the fact that they start pushing x-mas crap in July? How about the fact that they start pushing Easter items as soon as x-mas is over? How about the fact they start pushing Halloween items the day after Easter? That might be a tad exaggerated, but not by much!

Or their notion of seasonal items. Seasonal items like x-mas decor or Halloween stuff I understand. I went there one fall day intending to buy a boat seat, they told me boat seats were seasonal. I still can’t understand how a boat seat is seasonal when the entire population here lives less than 10 miles from Ky. Lake? Ky. Lake is an enormous section of the Tn. river boaters of all stripes use all year long. No a boat seat is NOT seasonal, thank you.

Then they went with self checkouts. Nevermind the fact that if they would actually have a couple of people manning the 50 registers they have, there would be little to no waiting. Nevermind it’s a Friday afternoon and everyone has just been paid, pushing along carts filled to the brim with goods and they have 3 checkouts open and the lines are ridiculous, what are they thinking? No, what bugs me about the self checkout is this, they are training us to do the work for them! They don’t have to PAY someone to run a register if they can train YOU to do the work! I, having a bit of insight and the desire to see the common man/woman succeed, try to always use a checkout manned by a human being getting payed an hourly wage. I would not see them lose their jobs because of my inclination to be in a hurry. I have used the self checkout a time or two I’ll admit, but I prefer to have a human get paid to check me out, even if I have to suffer for 10 minutes of waiting to get it done.

None of these usual aggravations is my source or irritation today. What has me miffed? Advertising. Not signage, signs I have been conditioned to for decades, no we now have an array of TV screens dangling from the roof, or hanging on the rack at the end of the aisles. They continously blare commercials for products, or push all of the benefits and perks of having a Wal Mart card. Rather loudly. Rather obnoxiously. For whatever reason, today was the day it pissed me off. Then to top it off, someone got on the in store intercom and advertised again for the Wal Mart card!

I for whatever reason, feel like I am getting pounded unneccessarily and from all angles. I can’t get away from it! It pervades the once serene shopping experience. It grinds away at my conciousness, it grates my fricken nerves, it’s like only getting two hours of sleep and then being hounded by six children of their wants and needs all at the same time. Leave me the hell alone!

If in the next few days, any of my much appreciated friends, readers, followers of the blog, hear about some crazy guy with a ball bat busting up electronic advertising in a Wal Mart, you can say “Hey! I might know that guy!”

Seriously, where does this end? Where is the line? I have seen sci fi movies exhibiting all kinds of floating, flashing signs well beyond my expectation of advertising saturation. Is that really where we are headed?

All I know is this, in the interests of my personal health, via the significant increase in my blood pressure from being there, I will have to do much less shopping at the Wal Mart. I would rather suffer the small inconvenience of having to stop at two stores to get all of my shopping done, or pay a tad more for this or that item, than be hounded with electronic advertising the entire time I am in their store trying to spend MY money.

Another thought on advertising. I will not buy or wear any kind of advertising. No hats with Coke, or Budweiser. No shirts conveying any advertising message. I’ll tell you why. I refuse to advertise for these companies for free, let alone BUY the advertising items with my own money, and then wear them for free. These companies spend millions of dollars every year for advertising, why on earth would I do that job for them? For nothing? After paying for the advertising item? They should be giving these things away if they want people to advertise for them! Even then they would still have to pay me to wear it. Now if a shirt or cap had something to do with an activity or charity I might support, I could be convinced to wear it. Maybe. But Large corporations are getting no free ride from little ole me, and Wal Mart, already long since having been a source of aggravation, is going to see less of me in their stores. With all of the other things they do that bug me, this is the one that has done it.