I hate you, Wal-Mart. You are never any help. You promise tens of thousands of square feet of goods, but astoundingly the one thing I need is never contained within your gargantuan girders. How dare you be so useless, after so shamelessly, even proudly, forcing my old standbys out of business?

Of your thousands of employees, only one old man, relegated to the token position of “Greeter,” has ever been any help. That kind gentleman found me a basket, far across the checkout landscape. I notice your stores are chronically in very short supply of these handy baskets. Sorry Wal-Mart, I’m just not buying a cart-full today, or any day.

Considering short supply, why, for the love of all things holy, do you bother installing 32 registers if you’ll only ever staff seven at a time?

I know it galls you to have to pay all those employees, but you’re only paying them a meager driblet above minimum wage, and you surely rake in enough even on a slow day to cover it all. You’re not fooling anyone. It’s not like these people have benefits, right? Hiring the majority of your workforce out of the lowest tax brackets has all kinds of perks, doesn’t it?

Less money equals less education, and the less educated your workers are about their rights, the less trouble you have from those misguided union-mongers. A few hazy threats and some shiny propaganda, and you have all the assistance you need from your own employees to stifle their quality of life. I bet you feel like a genius for getting the victim to do the dirty work against his own interests.

You almost make “willing victim” seem like employment terms.

I regret the time wasted waiting in your lines, dully staring down the dirty and uninviting impulse racks, 25 minutes at a time. You offend me by not even trying to appeal to me as a discerning shopper. I expect more sophisticated ploys than your grimy aisles and sloppily-arranged merchandise proffer. Enormous bins on skids, literal piles of product, do not sell themselves. You’re not a flea market. I expect at least a minimal effort to arrange items for sale, beyond what’s required to tow a skid to its designated floor space. You are too big and unwieldy for your own good, Wal-Mart. You don’t have time or the need to appeal to shoppers anymore. You slash and burn the retail landscape, successively lowering the bar for yourself and consumers.

My requests for assistance are usually ignored by your employees. I can’t totally blame them, since I know they don’t get paid enough to care. I can, however, totally blame your corporate boardrooms for the unforgiving way you slither into my environment - predatory locations within single-digit miles of one another, constricting the flow of commerce until it’s firmly in your gullet. Here’s hoping you choke.