Place: Buffalo Wild Wings
Lunch: Ribs & Tenders, buffalo chips
Fourteen different sauces and they don't have Ranch? Oh, they DO have Ranch? What? I have to pay EXTRA for it?!?
A shiny new Wal-Mart Supercenter opened on the west side of the metro this week. The whole west side has had to share a Wal-Mart for the past decade. A really crappy, dirty, cramped Wal-Mart.
It opened in the early 1990's as a regular Wal-Mart and later remodeled into a Supercenter. It's the busiest Wal-Mart I've ever seen...there's more people in there at three in the morning than most Targets at three in the afternoon. The "traditional" part of the building is pretty much the same as it was before expansion. Lots of merchandise packed into narrow aisles. Anything requiring staff assistance is handled slowly. I once was quoted a half hour for getting tires installed and left five hours later...the tire department guy refusing to even look at me the whole time. The seafood counter was never regularly manned. People working in the bakery would repeatedly be heard on the intercom calling for somebody to help the line of customers at the seafood counter...a problem they solved by getting rid of the seafood counter completely. Checkout lines were always understaffed, which Wal-Mart is apparently trying to solve by phasing out human checkers in favor of self-checkouts. Self-checkouts that don't work very well (and I've used self-checkouts at other Wal-Marts without problems). The property is, for all intents and purposes, an island. Their parking lot is accessable via a bridge entry from the main road or you can sneak through a path between two strip malls north of the neighboring Sam's Club. Either way ends up at the same two-lane four-way intersection. Don't even get me started on that. What are they going to do about that? Get rid of the parking lot? And don't even get me started on the customers. I have no idea where they come from but you don't see them anywhere else around town. Maybe they just inhabit the store full-time. That would certainly explain the foot traffic.
So I've traveled twenty miles to the other side of the metro for my Wal-Mart needs for the past few years.
Not anymore.
The new store has easy access, wide aisles, and not a single self-checkout in the building. And most of the hypocritical snobs who live there and complained about Wal-Mart coming in at all seem to be shopping there now.
Based on what I see in the parking lot of the other store, they're just as busy as ever.
Fine with me.
