The Walmart Zoo

I went to Walmart two days ago. I needed to buy a can of compressed air in order to clean the insides of my computer. Because I was lazy, I ended up leaving the house at 10 pm. Normally, I would buy stuff for my computer at Best Buy, but that closes at 9 pm.

When I was in High School, I used to love going to Walmart because it was open 24 hours. It was fun at 4 in the morning when nothing else was open, and my group of friends had nothing better to do. There's so many toys and things that are on display that you could play with, there's guns, fishing poles, video games to play, and even a McDonalds. Granted, I only did this once or twice. It's really hard to convince people to hang out at a retail store for no reason, regardless of it's store hours.

Over the years, our local Walmart changed it's store hours and started closing at 2 am. More recently, as I discovered two days ago, they close at 11 pm now. It's kind of depressing, but I can understand it. The suburbs of south jersey just don't have the kind of population that likes hanging out at Walmart for no apparent reason at 4 am.

Even now, the parking lot was entertaining. This old lady couldn't decide if she wanted to reverse out of her parking spot or not. Another car had it's reverse lights on but it was apparently the driver was waiting for the old lady to go first. She reverses about a yard, looks at her rear view mirror, see's the other driver's reverse lights, reverses another couple feet and stops. After a few seconds of contemplation, she reverses another foot or so, brakes, and drives back into the parking spot. She turns around and waves the other driver to go first, but it's 10 pm and I doubted the other driver saw her.

I didn't get to see the rest of the show though, it probably would have been pretty awkward if I stopped walking, folded my arms, and just waited to see what happened.

I spent 25 minutes inside Walmart trying to find a can of compressed air. It ended up being on the top shelf in the back corner of the electronics section fortress. I always found it awkward that only that section of walmart blocks itself off on 3 sides, and has only a small entry way that's flanked by two to three depressed older gentleman who probably hate their lives because they're approaching 50 and work at a Walmart.

My first trip through the electronic section, I completely missed the can of air. I decided to check the hardware section, the place where they keep all the painting supplies and other tools, assuming that maybe compressed air was also used for other things, not just dusting off electronics. When that didn't turn up any results, I headed back into the fortress, past the sentries, and back into the electronics section.

There were two arabic looking men looking at some audio cables and accessories. Though i'm not a racist, I'm pretty sure those could be used to make a bomb. Somehow they got a shopping cart through the front entryway, and they decided to block an entire aisle with their bomb making shenanigans. In the next aisle, there was a very loud and obnoxious black woman. She was talking about work or her love life, I didn't really listen, I just couldn't help but overhear since she decides to yell into her cellphone. It's moments like that where I wish cellphones were never invented. Or at least, retarded people shouldn't be allowed to use them.

There were so many other wonderful creatures at the Walmart zoo. Some were repulsive creatures that only came out at night. Some were rare species that met and bred only in that environment. And others were like me, spectators at the zoo, grabbing what they needed and leaving.

Or maybe, they just wanted to hang out at Walmart, because there was nowhere else to go.