Tag Archives: Walmart

Revenge, a Dish Best Served… Well Cooked

You may remember, (if you are goofy enough to actually follow this blog) that Walmart hates my car.  So, I figure the time has come to declare war.  It will be the great War on Walmart by Mickey.  And I am pretty sure they won’t even feel it.  You see, I went to their manager with a complaint about them trying to make my car fart itself to death with too much oil after they originally screwed up the oil change.  I mean, everything was entirely their fault.  They forgot to replace the cap on the engine when they first changed the oil.  They also forgot to drain the old oil out completely when they cleaned up their mistake and put in replacement oil (which they did for free and that apparently counts for more than I think it did).  They did remember, however, to hold on to the receipt so I would have no proof in court that they had even done this particular oil change.  And they were not going to reimburse me for the $140 I spent at the Ford garage to make sure their mistakes had not caused permanent expensive damage to my car.  They informed me that on the receipt I had signed my name to the fact that I brought the car in low on oil and that they were not responsible for any damage to my car that may have caused.  And besides, I couldn’t prove that they had done any damage to my car because the Ford dealer’s diagnostic results only proved that the car was NOT damaged.  So, they basically screwed me out of $140 dollars plus the original $30 for an oil change that had to be completely redone.  So, step one, never ever ever… and I mean completely never ever… get any automotive supplies or work done at Walmart ever again… never again!

The hated Walmart on Frankford and Marsh... scene of much Mickey's misery.

The hated Walmart on Frankford and Marsh… scene of much of Mickey’s misery.

Step two, find other ways to deprive Walmart of every Mickey dollar I possibly can of the huge chunk of my salary they soak up every month.  It is hard to make the money last as long shopping anywhere else, and Walmart has driven almost all of their competitors out of the area.  You can, for the most part, only buy the same things for more money at other area stores.  You are stuck shopping at Walmart because for the average American that is all you can afford.  But I found a place that actually sells groceries cheaper.  I followed all my Hispanic neighbors to Aldi’s.  Yes, Aldi’s has taken over for the Kroger’s and the Albertson’s in the hearts and minds of the local people.  (Walmart wiped out Kroger’s on Old Denton Avenue, and forced Albertson’s to raise their prices to stay open).  Aldi’s, however, saves money in every way imaginable in their little mom-and-pop-type stores.

My grocery cart at Aldi's.

My grocery cart at Aldi’s.

My cart at Aldi’s in the Paffooney above ended up costing me $41.32.  Now, I know for people as dinosaur-ancient as me this is a horrible price to pay for what once cost under $10, but it compares really well with the estimated $65 the same cart-full would’ve costs at the Walton family’s evil everything emporium.  And you can’t really see it in this view, but I have a good sized tub of Neopolitan ice cream in here that I bought for less than $4.  And there is a 24-bottle raft of drinking water in the cart for only $1.29.  (And yes, I also remember when you got water for free and the tap at home didn’t have only hot-and-cold running Texas frog-water in it… with all those delicious fracking fluids added in for flavor, but water now can only be safely had from Nestle bottle trees).  So, I can rebel against Walmart by not buying everything from them, and I still get to eat and feed my family.  I even save a few dollars.  And the best thing is… cookies!

You probably didn't spot these in my cart, but these are delicious Italian apple-cinnamon cookies for less than $2!!!

You probably didn’t spot these in my cart, but these are delicious Italian apple-cinnamon cookies for less than $2!!!

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Filed under humor, photo paffoonies, Walmart

Why Does Walmart Hate My Car? Episode Two

I wrote a thousand words yesterday about terrible things Walmart did to my car.  I intend to follow that up with an even more harrowing tale of Walmart car-maintenance malevolence.  They really do seem to be out to destroy my car.  This attack was on an innocent little Ford Fiesta that I bought in 2011.  Prepare for a journey into the bizarre and horrible world of Walmart oil changes and attempted autocide with malice of forethought.

20150929_103033Episode Two;  Murder by Massive Car Farts

Now, I know that there is no posted policy anywhere in the Walmart automotive section where they do oil changes, tire mounting, and random acts of evil, but I really believe they all work under the same directive to stick it to Mickey anytime and every time they can.

I have been cheated by them before.  One time I took the car in, waited for two hours, and even though I was watching through the window as they did the oil change, I had no visible evidence that they actually took any old oil out or put any new oil in.  When I asked them for the empty oil bottles, they said they pump oil from an overhead reservoir (which I did not see anyone physically do).  So, I paid them and went home.  But before I made a trip to Iowa, I had the Ford dealer do a more expensive oil change.  They said the oil looked okay but it really didn’t look like it was only a week old.  So, I’m deducing Sherlockian-style that Walmart charged me twenty dollars just hold my car for two hours and look at the oil.

That brings me to last Wednesday.  I knew better.  I knew I should take the extra time and pay the extra money to take it to the Ford dealer, but Walmart is temptingly close and convenient.  So, I took the thing in.  The amount of oil in the engine was a little low, so they did the oil change (I actually saw oil go in this time) and made me sign a waiver that said that Walmart was not responsible for any damage that might’ve been caused by having too little oil in the engine.  On Friday, while picking up kids from school, the engine overheated in traffic.  While sitting at one foul-tempered stoplight with fifty or sixty… thousand other cars, and running the heater on a ninety degree day to keep my engine from flaming out, the check engine light came on.  “Oh, no!” I thought.  “Walmart was prescient about damage from too little oil.”

At home I checked the ridiculously hot engine and found the cap from the top of the engine (where a Walmart technician puts in new oil) was missing.  So I take it back on Saturday afternoon to show them the problem.  “Oh, yes, we’ll clean this mess up and put in new oil for free.  Don’t you worry about this.”  (He miraculously found the cap in the precise spot by the radiator where he had left it three days before.)

I waited it out, and, sure enough, the engine light was no longer warning of imminent car death.  So I failed to notice that he had kept my receipt from the previous visit.  We chugged happily out of the Walmart parking lot and down Marsh Lane to a spot where we were closer to home than to Walmart.  The car started making choking sounds and blinking multiple warning lights at me.  Number two son pointed to smoke coming up from the corners of the hood.  And a massive blue-white cloud of car fart exploded out of the tail pipe, obscuring the traffic behind me for miles.  My Sherlockian brain immediately deduced that something was wrong.  An oil change is NOT supposed to have an effect like that on your car.  So we limped the rest of the way home and called Triple A.

Fixing the problem was no bowl of Jello pudding.  I called Triple A and they recommended a tow so that no further damage would be done to the engine.  The tow truck came and I asked him to take it to 5-Star Ford whom I had previously called and explained my dilemma.  This he did.  And there are at least three 5-Star Fords in the North Dallas area.  He took it to the wrong one.  So, I arranged to have them keep my little Ford pony for the rest of the weekend and fix the potentially expensive problem on Monday.  I was depressed all weekend.  The evil Walmart goblin hordes had apparently destroyed my car.  I ate a lot of ice cream… probably more than was good for an aging diabetic.

Finally, the day came when I could find out the bad news and possibly get my car back.  I learned Monday that it was not a completely fatal blow.  The technician at Walmart had put new oil in without draining out enough of what was in there.  So there was far too much oil in the system when I tried to drive it home.  Too much oil and too high an oil pressure apparently gives a car massive amounts of intestinal gas.  That led to the nearly fatal car fart.  I ended up paying six times as much for the corrected oil change as Walmart had initially cheated me out of.  At least I didn’t have to sell one of my kids into slavery in order to get the money to fix it.  And I learned a valuable lesson from this whole experience.  Walmart hates me!

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Why Does Walmart Hate My Car?

I have been having a lousy automotive time for the past few days thanks to Walmart.  And the kicker is, it is not the first dent in my soul put there by the Walmart corporate boot.  They are out to get me.  Specifically me.  Well, maybe paranoia and depression from chronic illness are not only good friends, but cousins.  But it does seem that Walmart is trying to destroy me.

20150929_102117

Episode One : Evil Decorative Parking-Lot Rocks

About five years ago I had a run-in with one of the corporation’s most seemingly innocuous assassins, namely a decorative parking-lot rock.

Look carefully at the expression on this rock's face.  Do you see the vicious smirk?  No?  Then he has you precisely where he wants you.

Look carefully at the expression on this rock’s face. Do you see the vicious smirk? No? Then he has you precisely where he wants you.

A more insidious lurking evil I have never encountered.  Why is it even there?  Does it make the parking lot more beautiful?  Does it make you want to buy hand lotion, bananas, and school supplies from Walmart?  Does it make you want to buy car tires?  It may make you need to buy car tires.  But this particular decorative rock nearly destroyed my car.  You see, Walmart parking lot drivers are some of the best drivers in Texas.  You can tell by the kill stickers on their driver’s doors.  The one that was coming for me that late October afternoon was an Ace.  I swear, I’m sure I saw a little stick man, a stick woman, three stick kids, and five stick cats on her car.  It only takes five kills to officially become an Ace.  She even had one of those stickers in her back window of cartoon Calvin peeing on a Ford logo… and my cars are all Fords.  I was trying to turn out of the adjacent parking area in front of her.  She was at least thirty yards away and going at a snail’s pace when I turned in front of her.  Suddenly she floored the thing and was zooming straight for the driver’s door.  I swerved up onto the curb to avoid a grinding death of shattered glass and broken metal (or possibly plastic… it is an American car after all).  And guess who was waiting for my car at that precise spot.  The front passenger-side tire went up over the rock and the car came down hard on top of it, impaling itself, making a huge dent in the floor of the car right underneath number one son’s passenger seat.  We were stuck there.  The car still ran at that point, but there was no way to get the car off the rock.  The Ace driver sped off down Marsh Lane satisfied with the kill.

So I called Triple A to get a tow truck to come and lift the poor impaled car off the rock.  The rock would not let go.  A passing guy who had been previously t-boned on that corner stopped to help my son and I get the car off the rock.  No matter how we all pushed or pulled, forward or reverse, the car was not going anywhere.  So I called the tow truck, thinking surely it could lift the car off the rock and I could still drive away from this.  But then we were blessed with the help of a family of portly Mexicans (honestly, the license plate on their car was from Mexico, and they spoke only Castillian Spanish from the central part of that country, so I am not being racist here.)  The jolly little man told me in Spanish that I could only partly understand that he had tow cables in his car and could pull me off the rock.  I tried to tell him in Pidgeon Spanish (yes, my Spanish is apparently for the birds) that, “no, no… I want to wait for the tow truck I called.”  Apparently my no, gracias meant something like “yes, please, and make it snappy,” in his version of Spanish.  So, the guy who took pity on us because he had also been a victim at that spot, and the happy Mexican guy hooked the back axle of my car up to the back bumper of his little Mexican car and then he had me put the car in reverse and try to drive backwards while he tugged away with his little chugger of a car that contained his plump little wife and three plump and excessively happy little kids.  He assured me in Spanish that he would rescue my car.  So… we got the car off the rock.  But we left a chunk of the oil pan from the bottom of the engine on the tallest of the three knobs on the top of that evil, evil rock.  There was a long trail of oozing black car blood on the rock and on the parking lot.  I could envision Walmart handing me a bill for cleaning up the mess in their parking lot and on their evil rock.

The happy smile on the face of the Mexican guy disappeared.  He quickly retrieved his tow cable and they chugged happlily off down Marsh Lane too.  The man who first tried to help us helped us move the now fatally wounded car in neutral over to an unused parking space to wait for the tow truck.  Of course, by the time he got there, the garage where I wanted to take the car was closed, so we had to hitch a ride home, and we arranged for the car-corpse to be towed in the morning.  The evil decorative rock had won.  There was now a gaping hole in my car, and an even bigger hole in my heart.  One would think that fate and evil corporations would be satisfied with such an outcome.  But no, there is more to come in Episode Two, which I will have to tell you about tomorrow.

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Stooges

borrowed from Wikipedia

borrowed from Wikipedia

Life is like a Three Stooges movie where I get to be Moe.  Yes, you heard me right.  I am the “smartest Stooge”.  And although a lot of the wacky plans my family carries out are my plans originally, I get more than my share of eye-pokes and head-slaps.

Financially I get more than my fair share of head-slaps.  My income has now been frozen in retirement mode for the remainder of my life.  I have to live three more years to get back all the money I paid into the pension plan for Texas teachers.  It is a better pension than teachers can earn now, but it is set up with standards from over two decades ago.  And, well, it is rather a difficult budget to manage when income is frozen and expenses are free to rise at will.  I just paid $45 for groceries at Walmart and got four sacks of edibles.  Seven cans of cheap-meal servings of chili and pork-n-beans (creating an alarming natural gas potential at our house), two cans of Pringles, 24 sodas in cans, two gallons of milk, Oscar Mayer salami, and some shampoo (hopefully we don’t have to eat the shampoo to avoid starving to death.  I remember a time when a similar stash for the pantry cost a mere $10.) The point is, Walmart is treating us like Stooges, in the same way Mr. Dimsell treats his Stooges while working in Dimsell’s Drug Store in the movie, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules.

https://youtu.be/QhcpU_usEck

The biggest point I am trying to make, I guess, is that I am at the bottom of Poop Mountain when it comes to the matter of finance and wealth.  (And poop not only rolls down hill, it avalanches down mountainsides.)  Right now the games that rich people and the Mr. Dimsells of the world play with money give us all sorts of head-slaps and eye-pokes.  Being able to own the whole drugstore is an unfair advantage.  Now that Dimsell is the only drugstore operator in the area, he can set prices as high as he pleases without worrying about losing Stooge business to other stores.  And he doesn’t have to treat his Stooges well, either.  He can be mean.  He can cut salaries and pensions in the secure knowledge that his Stooges will still have to come to him to spend their money no matter what.  More and more of the wealth goes into Dimsell’s pocket, and none comes out.  He is not compelled to share.  He doesn’t pay anything to fix the potholes in the streets outside his store.  He is, in fact given tax incentives just to be there and take our money.  So when my car needs repair because the pothole wheel-kicked my car to the point of needing repair, I will be forced to pay Dimsell to fix a problem that he allowed to poke me in the eye financially.  It is a real dumb deal, Porcupine.  (And yes, I know that drugstores don’t normally sell or repair tires, but Dimsell is a metaphor for Walmart, if you hadn’t figured it out by now.)

So, the only answer is to accidentally send myself back to the days of Hercules with a homemade time machine invented in the basement under the drugstore.  It will bring Dimsell to his knees and give him his just comeuppance.  And it will thoroughly prove I can carry metaphors and analogies way too far.

Minions are another form of Stooge... and I now have Kevin, Bob, and Stuart.

Minions are another form of Stooge… and I now have Kevin, Bob, and Stuart.

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