Self Check Out at Walmart

I’m no fan of shopping. In fact, I think that Black Friday is diabolical and that Christmas shopping is an inevitable vortex of death. I get sucked in every year but go down kicking and screaming “bourgeois” like a mantra. It gets so bad that recently my wife bemoaned my Christmas “morals” which weren’t making shopping any easier. In other words, I can be a mean one, Mr. Grinch.

But last week, after a trip to the dentist that only cost me $114 per kid, I needed to go to Walmart to get one thing, and I have to admit, I looked forward to going in. I bypassed the KFC/A&W, looked disdainfully at the diminutive Shopko, almost crashed at the odd intersections that funneled me toward the store, and finally stood before this monolithic Agora of small town America: a big, tan rectangular box with surveillance cameras on the top—cameras that were somehow comforting. If I were to get beat on the head and kidnapped, at least the footage would show up on the six o’clock news. Still, somewhere in my being, I anticipated the electric eye triggering the mechanism and rolling the doors back and leading me first into the Walmart foyer/mudroom and then the second set of doors opening into the huge bazaar, the hall of wonders that is Walmart proper. I felt some kinship with James Joyce’s narrator of “Araby,” though he at least had a name to conjure up wonder, “Araby.” I just had “Walmart”—perhaps the ugliest word in the English language.

But I had size, and size, as they say, is everything. Acres and acres of space and stuff just to wander around and get lost in. Somewhere in me, a la the supermarket sensations in White Noise, I just wanted to stroll down aisles and let the psychic date of product labeling speak to me.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t come in to spend profligate amounts. This was no Christmas shopping spree. All I needed was toilet paper. That’s it. Simple butt wipe. And what better place to get TP than Walmart? I was not feeding the corporate machine—this was about needs and necessities and totally justifiable.

I indeed found the toilet paper aisle, and then that other part of the experience of Walmart, or any shopping experience, began. Consumer anxiety. Which kind of toilet paper should I get? What’s the best deal? Should I go for the White Cloud because it’s cheapest? Or the Charmin brand because of name recognition? If I bought the White Cloud, wouldn’t I get home to find out it was thinner, less tightly rolled, and therefore not as good a deal? Did I want 8 regular rolls? Or 8 double rolls of 12? Or 12 rolls of 24? Or 6 rolls of 48? Or 4 rolls of 96? What did all these numbers mean?

In the midst of panic, my head cleared for a moment—middle brand, find a middle brand! I picked up some Cottonelle, twelve rolls of I’m not sure what thickness.

Then we were out of there. Except for one thing: on the way in, at the sight of the KFC/A&W, I had said to my boys, “How about after Walmart we have root beer floats?” Now, clearer thinking set in. We had just come from the dentist and it was getting on in the afternoon—about 4:30. That meant supper was on the horizon and I didn’t want to make another stop or draw the ire of their mom.

Fortunately, one of my sons had seen the psychic data for the snack section on the way in, so I sidetracked us thusly. Then we had another consumer choice. Holiday Snack Cakes, Holiday Marshmallow Treats, Christmas Tree Cakes, Star Crunches, Cosmic Brownies, Devil Squares, Oatmeal Crème Pies. One son wanted one kind, the other another. I tried to sell them on Oatmeal Crème Pies, another household name I felt safe with. They both rejected it wholeheartedly. Then I directed them up to the Gummi Bear Fruit Snacks—small, savory, a non-appetite ruiner—and managed to strong-arm on them on that choice.

In and out of Wal-Mart with toilet paper and Gummi Bears, relatively untainted. As we headed to the checkouts, the aisles directly ahead of us were wide open but unmanned and labeled “Self Checkout.” However, I had some time, now that I’d saved myself a stop at KFC/A&W, plus “Self Checkout” scared me. What if I didn’t possess enough techno-savvy to safely navigate my way through? What if I did it wrong and got hauled in for shoplifting? What if I couldn’t figure it out and caused a traffic jam of fuming fast-laners behind me? And besides, wasn’t this so-called “self-checkout,” this elimination of the sacred human interaction between buyer and seller, exactly the evil part of Wal-Mart that I didn’t want to support?

I veered from the open self-checkouts for a line with only one patron in it, completely content to wait my turn, to wait for the human interaction with what seemed like a completely competent clerk. Plus, the woman in front of me didn’t have that much in her cart.

Or maybe she did. She had her cart about half empty when I pulled into line—and then I saw several cases of pop and assorted bargains underneath her cart. And then there was some matter about gift cards. She had grabbed some from somewhere between the gum and US Weekly but now there was some controversy about the clerk “loading them.”

“We can’t load them here because . . .” she was saying. And the woman wasn’t getting it. The unloading process had ground to a halt. Suddenly this human interaction thing seemed like not such a good idea. I had been standing here with two kids anxious for fruit snacks for all of 78 seconds but, by the looks of it, I had another 78 to go.

So I bailed. Headed for the self-checkout. How hard could it be? No harder than human communication.

I pulled into the nearest aisle where a nice gentleman, a shade older than I am, was just finishing up a purchase. I could watch him and learn and based on this knowledge I was sure I could make it through—-run the technology gauntlet so to speak.

Just as the guy was finishing, he muttered under his breath and reached back to the child seat area of the cart. “Sorry, I forgot one thing,” he sighed. He was as anxious as I was.

“No, problem, I’ve never done this before,” I confessed, I’m not sure why. What I meant was that, since it was my first time, I, too, might make a mistake, which meant I could understand his embarrassing predicament.

He went through a ritual of touching the screen, swiping a plastic card, moving his product—I didn’t see what it was, something small like a coaster or something—across the scanner, waiting, then moving on through.

“Sorry again,” he said.

“No problem,” I said magnanimously.

I moved ahead to the touch screen, which started with a picture from a point of view behind an animated character—like Lara Croft but not nearly that ridiculously voluptuous, more Walmart-ish—standing in exactly the position that I was at the register. Then a voice talked to me, walking me through the process: “Scan your first item,” it began. I did, something beeped, the price appeared on the screen. Success. On the metal edge next to the glass scanner there was a note that said, “Touch your purchase here.” I was confused. Did I have to touch the metal piece so as to “demagnetize” it or something, so I would not set off bells and whistles and draw the attention of security when I exited? I touched it. Nothing happened. Oh well.

With my second item, I had a bit more trouble with the scanning, but eventually I heard the magic beep again and my mind was put at ease. I swiped my card, punched in my secret code, bagged my purchase in the millionth plastic bag, and my quest was complete. I left through the automatic doors without bells and whistles, without guard dogs or the SS.

As I walked out, I saw the troublesome woman with unloaded gift cards just leaving her checkout aisle. I had saved myself at least thirty seconds: a very wise choice.
By the time I’d left, I felt as if I’d completed a quest: I’d been purged of something and I had toilet paper.

As I left with that bittersweet sense of accomplishment and frustration, however, I knew that at some point I’d probably return to buy a present or two. The experience would be my toilet paper experience on steroids, with an especially increased sense of emotional jostling.

With the rectangular box and surveillance cameras in my mental rearview mirror, I decided that Walmart is the opposite of a stable with a manger in it. And then I realized how cliché that realization is. Most of the stories I’ve read of the first Christmas paint Bethlehem as busy as a Walmart at Christmas time. “But there was no room for them in the inn,” gets rendered into “There was so much bustle, no one would even make room for the Son of God to be born.” And so the story becomes a parable for how the busyness of shopping overwhelms the proverbial “reason for the season,” a phrase that winds up being a commercial jingle among commercial jingles.

My sense is that “there was no room for them in the inn” is more connotative of callousness than it is bustle: a young woman nine months pregnant and no one will give up a spot for her? Perhaps there is that bourgeois element to it. Mary was presumably young, and Joseph and Mary were so working class, and they were from Nazareth nonetheless. And so they end up in a stable, or at least in some place where there’s a manger. We don’t actually get the word “stable” in scripture. One place on the internet claims Jesus was probably born in the ground level of a relative’s house, a section that housed the animals and thus had a manger. As a believer in story itself, however, I cling to tradition here: born in a barn, only barn animals for witnesses, wrapped in “strips of cloth and lying in a manger.” This setting fits the pattern of human callousness in any era.

I had started this essay intending to declare at this point that Walmart is the opposite of a stable, but now that I’m here I cannot do it so easily. Supposing a dirt poor couple—out of towners or even foreigners without health insurance—showed up in a small Midwestern town, and presuming a somewhat-difficult-to-imagine callousness that excluded them from a small town hospital, wouldn’t a Walmart be a logical place for them to take refuge? “Supposed ‘Baby King’ Born in Walmart’”—who couldn’t imagine that headline? Or bourgeois readers like me looking down on the child born there? Or, even more likely, the King could be born in the place of nomads and truckdrivers: “Winter Birth in Walmart Parking Lot Dubbed ‘Miraculous.’”

But that brings me back to callousness, disregard, busyness. Maybe Walmart is akin to Bethlehem at Christmas time because of these things. Remember the annual “running of the people” on Black Friday that left one individual trampled to death and many more injured? Beyond callous.

No, for the setting of the first Christmas, I’ll take the stable because it’s so countercultural. Because it speaks so loudly to human depravity and callousness. Because it’s so out of the way, so unworthy of even horrific press. Because wherever Jesus was born, it wasn’t a place that conjured up grandeur; there were no electric eyes watching, no surveillance cameras. Rather, where the King was born was marginal, because too many people went through the self-checkout in order to speed on their selfish little ways.

This Christmas season I’m struck again by the fact that “She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”

How absolutely callous of us. It’s no wonder they’ve banned nativity scenes from public places. Think of what they remind us of. Think of how absolutely countercultural a stable and a manger still are.