Confusion Envy

I hate shopping! Especially I hate the walking through a store these days, and really appreciate being able to use an electric cart, but even so, there comes a point of end of tolerance. My brain starts screaming at me to leave the store, it doesn't matter what's still left on the list, GET OUT!

That's on a good day.

Lately there's been a whole lot of shopping to do to get ready for vacation. We need to restock RV supplies, stock food, replace that missing sleeping bag, all on top of normal groceries and prescriptions and cleaning supplies and.... At least I know enough about myself to have started early and plan to just take chunks out of the mega-list on any given trip. It should be fairly simple.

Of course, those things never work out that way.

The WalMart in Forest Lake, my most common route home, is converting to a super center. This means the parking lot is a complete mess. Nobody has bothered to re-stripe the parking lot for the new main entrance for construction, so the handicap parking spaces are either under concrete barricades or four aisles away from the door. Inside, everything is in a new location, short-stocked, and otherwise unfindable.

The Target next door to it is just fine in the parking lot department, but apparently feeling a need to compete with WalMart in the move-everything-around, add-groceries, and short-stock-everything-else department. Of course, I only find that out on the rare occasion when they actually have a working electric cart for use. There are about 18 handicap parking spaces by the door and only two carts - if both are working and one is available at the time. Complaints do not seem to help, even when I explain that I came in with a list that I'll take to WalMart if there are no electric carts. WalMart at least gets that part right.

If I'm already home before I start shopping, I'll go across the border to St. Croix Falls to their WalMart to shop. They moved and expanded to a super center a few years back, but apparently they've been having confusion-envy recently. Everything in the store is getting relocated, short-stocked, and generally turned into chaos. They're taking whole shelf units apart, leaving stacked parts in the middle of aisles, and if you time it right, you can catch four of their employees with brooms raising a dust cloud that covers a quarter of the store. I can't believe how much dust accumulates under a shelving unit! I thought you had to have two messy sons, a pair of dogs and three cats to make that kind of a dust pile! (I should know.)

For some unknown reason, they're moving everything in the grocery aisles to other aisles. Everything, that is, except the signs. Canned fruits look suspiciously like pickles. Rice resembles canned corn and peas. The Mexican aisle is empty. There's a long row of cleaning products now with names like Pepsi, Coke, Shasta, Canada Dry. Somehow I doubt their effectiveness at removing the dirt I had in mind to get rid of, and it seems an awfully expensive toilet bowl cleaner. I usually treat my bowl to that stuff after a bit of processing. Maybe I'm just cheap that way.

At any rate, I got fed up and left the store even earlier than my usual shopping limit kicks in. Or maybe it just took so much longer to find a little bit that the internal clock stayed the same but the basket didn't fill.

Whatever.

They say they'll be done by the end of July. I'm not sure I can last that long.