Growing up in the beautiful swamp that is Brazoria County, Texas, you learned quickly that you took entertainment where you could get it. I’m not saying that it was boring, but having fun did require a certain amount of creativity. Some of the kids, by which I mean the ones who weren’t the drum major of the band and a member of the madrigal singing ensemble – y’know, cool kids – were rumored to collect in the fields owned by absentee cattle ranchers for pasture parties. I did not get invited to these parties. I’m not convinced they really existed.
The rest of us? Yeah, we hung out at the mall. Oh. Late Millennial readers, a ‘mall’ was a large structure which housed a variety of different stores, pretzel restaurants and a kiosk that offered, but to my knowledge never actually sold, small bits of ice cream flash frozen with liquid nitrogen. Gen Z readers, a ‘store’ is like Amazon, but…anyway, the problem was that around 9PM, the mall closed. But there was a place, a magical place, which never closed. A place where the small town Texas kids who didn’t drink and were too awkward for words could go at any hour to have slightly-above-replacement levels of fun.
Walmart.
I don’t have to defend myself to you, and I won’t. I have an affection for Walmart. Even beyond my affection for the place, I think it has probably done more than any one other company to improve the quality of life of the everyday American. Walmart, along with generally free trade, have allowed the average lower and middle class American to enjoy technology, home amenities, foods and conveniences that we could only have dreamt of 50 years ago.
If you’ve got a “yeah, but” forming in your head, save it. I know what Walmart has done to many small businesses that offered a valuable niche service. God, I desperately miss having a small town butcher. I also know that a job at Walmart probably doesn’t offer the quality of life that most people imagined for themselves. If we’re going to survive the widening gyre, however, there’s a trick we have to learn.
