A Couple Rants and Some Musings

First the rant: WalMart Sucks! Somehow I don't think I'm the only one with this opinion. This morning Jimmy and I took off for our local WalMart (about 5 minutes away) to get some dog food for the boys.

My Snoopy

is allergic to corn and can't eat anything with corn or cornmeal as a primary ingredient; he breaks out in sores if he does. I was feeding the boys Ol' Roy Skin and Coat Formula (lamb & rice) but all of a sudden it seems to be illegal to carry that particular line of WALMART'S OWN BRAND in North Pinellas County. I used to be able to get it in Tampa when I worked over there but I'm not going all the way over there; can't afford the gas! So I switched them to Rachael Ray Nutrish (tm) chicken & veggies which they love. Naturally our sorry little local WalMart (in Largo on Missouri Avenue at Rosery Road if you want to avoid it) didn't have that. Grrr!

So I went to the nearest WalMart Neighborhood Market at Highland Avenue and Greenlea Street in Clearwater. They only had a little 6 lb. bag and that was leaking. Hello? I'm feeding 2 dogs! Six pounds of food won't last. So I then went to the WalMart at U.S. 19 and Northeast Coachman Road, the one they're converting into a superstore...very, very slowly.

By this time I'm steaming and I told the guy working there that it was absolute BS that I had to go running all over the county to try to find dog food they carried only a month ago. It seems because they're "expanding" they've discontinued a lot of their lines. Sheesh!

Finally I had to suck it up and go to the WalMart Super Center in Oldsmar. OLDSMAR! I live in southwest Clearwater, almost in Largo and I had to go to Oldsmar! I'm unemployed so I don't have the money to waste gas like that. I also don't have the money to buy a more expensive premium food! I'm sure that if I had complained loud enough they would have been happy to direct me to another brand that would have cost $4-5 more a bag. I used to like WalMart but after being met with such a poor brand selection and incompetence today I'm changing my opinion. The hell of it is I'm on a very limited budget and I usually can't get what I need less expensive elsewhere. It's a Catch-22 and I hate it.

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Second WalMart Rant: Idiots who don't return shopping carts to the cart return. I know it's a problem at most stores with shopping carts but it seems to be worse at WalMart than anyplace else. I mean, how stupid and/or lazy are these people? I can almost understand it if you're parked at some distance from a cart return but I've seen idiots (yes, they're idiots) leave carts next to their cars when the cart return was RIGHT ACROSS THE PARKING LOT! Not a few spaces away either; I mean if the person backed their car up straight they would run right into it. And when the return is only 2 or 3 spaces down and you can't put your cart there that's pretty damn lazy/stupid too. So I got "carted" in a WalMart parking lot today because someone didn't want to make the effort to put their cart back in the proper place. Granted, our car is pretty beat up, but really! Wake up, people! Put the shopping cart in the cart return; that's what it's there for!

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Musing: Two days after Jimmy was born a couple tornadoes tore through Kearney, Nebraska causing a lot of property damage and frayed nerves...and made it into an episode on The Discovery Channel show Storm Chasers. I think it's affected him. My little Husker is actually more of a little twister. Like the tornadoes of his birth, he can plow randomly, mercilessly, blindly, and even blithely through the landscape causing great destruction and mayhem. Of course being almost 2 now he thinks it's great fun. (Was I this much of a handful at his age? If so, Mother, I'm sorry.) Such is life with a tornado, er, toddler. I need to go put parts of the house back together.