Adventures in Wal-Marting

Unfortunate Wal-Mart stories are nothing new. Normal people - that is, people who don't think of going to Wally World as "getting out of the house" or "taking the kids to do something fun" - usually dread the Wal-Mart experience much like going to the dentist, but suffer it anyway due to incredibly cheap crap all in one place. (Still not sure why that's appealing, but...)

Our last trip saw us ringside for a brewing brawl between a lanky white woman with bad teeth and parachute pants that I didn't even know they still sold and a large black woman who was so close to popping out of her strapless top that I thought my old physics teacher might consider it a case study. The fight was over who was next in line: I guess the black woman had waited already and was then allowed to come to the front upon her return, and the white lady didn't like that too much, slapping her goods upon the counter before the other could.

Of course, this entire time the 18 year old behind the counter was tacitly exacerbating the situation by looking down at the floor and failing to explain anything. Though - when it had partially diffused - she was kind enough to mutter something derogatory about the white lady under her breath, which started the whole affair over again.

I love watching a good fight, so I was tempted to stick around, but my wife wanted to leave since we had just been waiting an hour trying to get a price on a single item after pulling two employees from stasis, only to have them run for the back under the guise of "finding help." The third, actually at the customer service desk, said she was going to check on the item and acutally clocked out and left. Classic.

The funny thing is, when we began to recount this funny story to three completely different sets of friends and relatives, they all said - I'm not kidding - "It was Valley View, wasn't it?"

I'm a data analyst, and this is the sort of thing we tend to call "statistically significant."

Why is it that the Valley View Wal-Mart is so lame? The demographics, at first inspection, seem to be about the same as most other Wal-Marts I've ever been to, and the employees care just as little about their jobs as they do at every other Wally World, so what am I missing here?