What's Up With That?

I come from the home of Wal-Mart...Arkansas. I've lived with one for as long as I can remember. There was a tiny one in the corner of a shopping center in my home town before it moved to a new location when I was in elementary school in a building by itself. It's moved two more times since then and is now a Super Wal-Mart.

When we moved to Highland, Illinois, in 2000, it was a temporary move for 10 months until we moved closer to Scott AFB (but so as not to confuse you, my husband was in the Army). They had a brown Wal-Mart. Now if you come from the land of Wal-Mart, you know that brown came way before the blue color scheme they have now. While we lived there, they even closed the brown Wal-Mart and moved to a new Super Wal-Mart. I can't help but wonder if that was the last brown Wal-Mart in existence.

Another Wal-Mart inevitability was the little green price tags they always plastered on everything. It's been a long time since I've seen those, because really, who needs them? We've had the scanners for the UPC codes for probably 20 years and they put the prices on the shelves. Plus as much as Wal-Mart has price breaks, think how often they'd have to fix their little stickers.

Well, I've moved to some parallel universe that puts prices on the shelves, has the scanners for the UPC bar codes, and USES LITTLE GREEN WAL-MART STICKERS! Do you know what this does to my OCD?


And some Wal-Marts have white stickers? Why white?

See what this looks like together in my refrigerator? Ick!

I'm one of those people that has to take the stickers off the plastic storage containers as soon as I get them home and know they are the right size. If I buy something that is glass that has a sticker on the bottom and it would show, I have to take it off. And I have to get every last bit of goo off too, plastic or glass or paper or whatever. Because some books you buy have stickers too. Those can be tricky. So you know how much these little Wal-Mart stickers are bothering me? A lot. I see them every time I open my refrigerator. That's where the biggest culprits live. Most of the others I take care of because they aren't hidden. But I'm a little too lazy for those refrigerator stickers.

And you can't tell me Wal-Mart is using them to try to help with pricing at the checkout line, because one of the stickers was wrong the other day on a towel I bought, although several others were right, and I watched just to see what would happen with that one. It rang up at the correct lower price, not the sticker price. They have to pay someone to do it. So what's the purpose?

Maybe they knew I was moving to Michigan and thought I needed practice on my sticker-removal technique.