Super Wal-Mart

I have a horrible habit of starting to cook dinner and then realizing halfway through that I’m missing an ingredient. That used to work out okay because, more often than not, I could run to the grocery store that was just five minutes away. I now live thirty minutes from the nearest grocery store, which means that I have to be much more deliberate in planning the grocery shopping.

I also used to like to shop around. There were two grocery stores right next to each other by my old home in Arvada, and I knew which store had the better deals on which items. And for anything the grocery store didn’t carry, Target was just around the corner.

I have now become a Super Wal-Mart shopper.

I used to dislike Wal-Mart. But now, since it’s such an ordeal just to get to the store (ANY store) and the stores aren’t quite as close to each other, it’s easiest to do one-stop shopping at the Super Wal-Mart in Gallup. Meat, cleaning supplies, shoes for the kids, housewares, fresh produce, even a complete liquor store. The Gallup Super Wal-Mart has it all.

But there’s a catch: There is an acceptable window of time for shopping at Super Wal-Mart, and if you miss that window, your shopping experience may become an all-day endeavor.

Super Wal-Mart is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Between the hours of 11:00am and 7:00pm, however, Super Wal-Mart is besieged by the residents of the surrounding Indian reservations. They are perfectly nice people, but there are trillions of them.

I have to admit that I lack significant experience with Indians. (I guess the more politically correct term would be “Native Americans,” but all the ones I’ve met call themselves Indians.) I do, however, have significant experience with Mexicans. I am a Sanchez, after all, and while my paternal ancestry is more Spanish than Mexican, I have researched my family history enough to know that there are plenty of Mexican branches in my family tree. 

There are some amazing cultural similarities between Indians and Mexicans. But the cultural similarities are nothing compared to the shopping similarities. When I shopped for the first time in a Super Wal-Mart full of Indians, I realized that Indians might just be more Mexican than Mexicans.

They go shopping with all of their children, and the room with the win-a-stuffed-animal claw game and the fiberglass-horse-ride becomes an indoor amusement park. The aisles are plenty wide, but each person pushes their cart right down the middle to make sure no one can pass on either side, and they’re prone to stopping in the middle of the aisle to stare at the many varieties of instant rice for a good five minutes or so until they’ve decided on one to buy. Then, they move down the aisle about 15 feet and stop again to look at canned soup. It took me three times as long as it normally would have to collect all of my groceries.

And then I reached the checkout lane.

When I shop, I get dry goods first so that the meat and dairy won’t be sitting in my unrefrigerated cart for too long. When I reached the checkstands, I was pleased to realize that at least half of the lanes were actually open. (In Denver, it seemed like there were always 30 checkstands and only two that were open at any given time.) But I was dismayed to realize that each lane had at least nine people waiting in line, and each person has a cart that is filled to the brim. And most of those little “ON” lights are blinking, because everyone (and I do mean everyone) wants a price check.

It took me literally an hour to wait in line and pay for our groceries.

So there is officially no longer such a thing as a quick trip to the grocery store. If there’s an ingredient I’ll need while cooking dinner, it had better be on a list a good week or two before it’s needed.