Sensory Overload!!!

Last night I left Beosig to tend to Kiernan and attended a jewelery party at a friend's house. It was...ok. Nice to see her again as we don't see each other often, but honestly I have been to jewelery parties with way better selections. Need to invite her to the next one my usual group hosts. Anyway, I am side tracking.

On my way home, I needed to stop by a store for something for Kiernan's snack day at school/daycare. Conveniently, (perhaps a little too conveniently), there was a Wal-Mart that I had passed on the way to this friend's house, so I swung by on my way home. Wow, what a mistake.

I have always hated Wal-Marts in general. My reasons are many but mainly for those I list below.

• Wal-Mart tends to kill of locally owned businesses. No small business owner can compete with their prices. They purchase in mass quantities that no small business could dream of affording.
• As a consumer, it is hard to deny the pricing of Wal-Mart is better, and eventually we all end up going there. Particularly during this time of our down-turned economy.
• Something about Wal-Mart seems to attract parents who refuse to discipline their children! Yes I know I have a child, and indeed I have been known to take him with me to Wal-Mart, but I'll be damned if you will see me standing in line with him while he has a temper tantrum and all the while I pretend nothing is happening. No way I say! Yet this seems to be a very common occurrence, and in my experience the tendency for this to occur always is greatly increased at Wal-Mart over other stores. Anyone care to offer theories as for why this happens? I'd love to hear them.

Anyway, as I was saying, I swung by this convenient Wal-Mart on my way home. It looked fairly normal on the outside, but as I walked through the last sliding door to the inside, I was overwhelmed. Never before in my life can I say I was struck with what I can only describe as sensory overload, but that is what happened to me at that moment.

The store was lit by an unmeasurable number of bright white lights. No, not the normal bright lights in a store, think hospital bright. It made the store seem unbearably bright. Perhaps almost like standing in a spotlight, only without the heat and the entire store is lit up to the same degree. The assault did not end there. As I continued to evaluate my surroundings I found every direction I looked in I was facing a number of flat screen TV's.

Now, I know in the Wal-Mart stores I had been in prior to this there were a few of these flat screen TV's advertising various products followed by a Wal-Mart ad. I'm ok with that to a point, I guess. This store went way beyond that.

There was a flat screen TV on every end cap, above the fruit, above the stand-alone meat refrigerator, literally EVERYWHERE I looked. They were not running the same thing on all of them, oh no, that would be too easy to ignore. Instead, each end cap was running an ad for the item on display there. Deodorant here, lotion there, fruit over there, pharmacy ads near the pharmacy window, meat recipe ideas over the meat refrigerator, the list goes on and on. There were so many things playing on these flat screens that I didn't know what to pay attention to. All of them were in very close proximity to each other as well, only making things worse.

Interestingly, once I realized what I was faced with, I had only two things on my mind. Find the one item I came in for as quickly as I can and leave the place, never to return. Sensory overload makes that difficult though. It took me probably twice as long and with all of the distractions in the store it made it hard to keep a single train of thought. I seriously hope that this Wal-Mart I stumbled upon does not become the norm in other stores. I wonder if maybe the idea behind this arrangement was to make people get done with their shopping more quickly, that would make sense. I will have to do some research on human behavior to figure that one out.