I do not generally shop at Walmart because I don’t mind paying a little more to get stuff at stores that are more convenient to get to and also aren’t trying to dominate the global market with dubious practices. But sometimes I do because they have stuff that isn’t available elsewhere.
Take t-shirts for example. They sell a brand called George. I don’t know if this is named after George Walton or Curious George or some other George, all I know is the t-shirts are so cheap I don’t care if they don’t last. I just buy a bunch and wear them during the summer and recycle them when they start coming out of the wash with impossibly wrinkly collars and the like.
I know buying these t-shirts makes me in some small way a terrible person. I can live with that. $5 a pop is hard to resist.
But there’s a problem. I don’t fit the Walmart demographic. Or at least I’m pretty sure I don’t. When I go to the Mens section and find the George t-shirts, I find two immense displays of them in a multitude of colors. Some are $5, others are $7. I can’t tell why some are $2 more than others and I don’t care. $7 is still super cheap. When I ambled in yesterday (I had gone to Lougheed Town Centre for other things) I had a specific goal in mind. Most of my t-shirts are fairly neutral-looking: dark blues, slate grays and the like. They don’t, as they say, pop. I wanted to get some that said “It’s freaking summer, baby!” I went to one of the two giant displays, my eye immediately drawn to a huge pile of purple t-shirts. It was a nice purple, not dark but also not tracking toward lavender. It was bright. It popped. I then did what I always do. I started looking for the small size, as that’s what I wear.
There were a few mediums. There were more than a few larges. Extra large (XL)? Quite a few. XXL? Enough to construct the main tent for the Cirque du Soleil. Perhaps there was a stray small buried inside this massive pile of purple. But no, there was not. I approached a stack of bright, almost neon, green and got the same results. I currently weigh a little over 160 pounds and am working my way back to my normal weight of 150. I figure I could have walked out of that store with any color t-shirt I wanted if I only weighed twice as much.
But I do not.
I ended up getting a dark blue t-shirt and a nice bright red (the only small in that color) and a bright yellow (also the only small in that color). Among several hundred shirts (really, they had these suckers piled up) the number of smalls could be counted on one hand. One small hand.
I’m going to check out some other stores with not-Walmart pricing to see if this is, in fact, not a Walmart-specific phenomenon. Is the small-sized t-shirt guy really a tiny minority? I shall find out soon, in the name of science.