This is not Wal-Mart...

In the South, it has become something of a standard to compare everything to Wal-Mart. Not just bargain shopping and looking for the best deal, but it seems to actually have boiled down to blackmail now.

If a customer wants something, they will use the "But Wal-Mart..." line and almost always seems to get the discount they want.

Where rapists go when they're sent to Hell. 

Which is kind of stupid when you do the math-at our store, if you use the coupons and sale items and all the deals we have in a week then you're saving a significant amount more than if you got all of them from Wal-Mart. Wal-mart doesn't do sales anymore - or at least the one in our town never seems to - and they just have cheap stuff all the time. Now don't get me wrong, I shop at Wal-Mart. Everyone does in some capacity. There are practical reasons to purchase items at their stores. 

But I do not buy meat or fish from them unless it's from the frozen section. I know what they do to their meat products to keep them 'Fresh'. Yeah, no thanks.

Oh God! It's moving! Kill it, kill it, kill it!!!

I like our store's meat department, they're very much like a small butcher shop. They can custom cut your meat however you like and for a town like this - that's really cool. And they always have awesome Buy one/Get one free deals. I've gotten two giant rump roasts on BOGO for $7.00. Yay meat!

 And the bakery. While admittedly they have made some decent strides in getting better breads, their cakes still taste like saw dust and lard.  You can tell you paid $14 for that sheet cake.

 Mmmm...Fiber.

People always ask us why our 1/4 sheet cakes are $18.99 as opposed to Wally World's $14.99. Simple reason? They're better quality. They're honestly good cakes. And the fillings inside help keep them moist. And if price is really an issue for a customer as it commonly is, you can always get a smaller cake. After all, most people buy more cake then they really need.

"These cakes are so expensive!"

"Well, that size feeds up to 24, how many would you need to feed?"

"It's just the family, about six or seven people."

"Well, the next size down - the 1/8 sheet - feeds ten and it only $9.99."

"That dinky thing? We want more cake then that!"

And in the end, I have no say in the pricing of our items. People with big college degrees and fancy cars decide those. And when we do have items going out we mark them down. And people will shop with us JUST for the markdowns. So I know they like our stuff, but hell be damned if they'd ever pay full price.

One incident stands out in my mind.

We carry Pumpkin Spice bars. It's a layer of pumpkin spiced cake, a layer of cream cheese icing, another cake layer, and more icing. and it's all given a light coating of pumpkin spice. It may be one of my favorite things. They're delicious! And they're also $6. So we don't sell a lot of them at that price. But when we mark them down! Oh nelly! You better hold onto your knickers lads.

 This isn't our spice cake but I needed a drool worthy image...

A lady approached me one day asking if we had any markdowns and I pointed her to the rack we had put them on. As I help her go through the selection, she mentions to me that she bought a pumpkin spice bar for $0.99 once (when we have a lot going out in a day we will mark it dirt cheap) and she returned it because the cake was dry. I bite my tongue and apologize, help her make her selections, and see her off to the registers.

Now allow me to explain what bothered me about this. Markdowns by their nature are not fresh. Marked down cakes are not going to be as moist as a fresh one because it's OLD. To waste the money on gas to return an item worth only $0.99 is so insane to me. She probably spent that amount of gas - or more! - just driving back down to the store...