In the contest of Wal-Mart versus Target, we do drop more dollars at Target than at Wal-Mart. They are within a few hundred meters of each other, neither is harder to get to than the other, both are right on our way to I-25.
But please allow your humble narrator to point out that Target's sporting goods section has Pilates accessories.
Wal-Mart's sporting goods sections stock Mini-14's. Target may be hipper, trendier, neater, and all that, but they can also be too "city mouse" for me---they can give me the same cloying sensation that accompanies an Old Navy commercial.
The Wal-Marts that feature "dingy aisles loaded with cast-offs and marked down boxes of cereal" (say, Dell Range Boulevard in Cheyenne, Wyoming), usually redeem themselves by including an aisle of reloading equipment, right down to blister-packed replacement decapping pins for RCBS dies.
Alas, Castle Rock's 24/7 Wal-Mart supercenter has no dingy aisles (Firstborn likes to coo over the live lobster tank). Instead of a reloading section, it has an expanded golf aisle. As best I can determine, the customers still have all of their teeth, normal or better-than-average body fat indexes (visualize trophy wives driving Escalades and Hummers), and no domestic violence convictions (one terrible incident in the parking lot, however). In short, a redneck level waaaay below the national average.
The clerk in Sporting Goods there today replied instantly, "no reloading", so quickly in fact that
- it was clear he knew what "reloading" was
- he knew whether any Wal-Mart anywhere would stock reloading merchandise
- this Wal-Mart, serving the Douglas County demographic, would rather stock velvet Elvis paintings, or Nine Inch Nails CDs, than reloading merchandise, and
- I should have known better than to ask.
So no RCBS decapping pins for Fuz today, grumble grumble.
When it came time to load up Linux for the new Clandestine Media Access Platform, to what reseller was Fuz referred by Lycoris? Wal-Mart.
I know that some fellow bloggers refuse to give Wal-Mart business because they import heavily from the People's Republic of China. Point well taken. Just remember that they sell Linux-equipped PCs too. Give them some credit---though they may be selling products of slave labor, they are also, in a sense, selling handcuff keys.
And the pissants who militate against the esthetics of Wal-Marts (excepting blogrolled comixho, of course) are often the same busybodies who form homeowners' associations, and whine over the decline of quote small private downtown shops unquote while kvetching over a recycled paper cup of something syrupy at Starbuck's. If they give a rat's ass about workers' rights, it will not be those of the Chinese who chafe in the PRC's collar.
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