The Steelyard Wal-Mart is the Worst Wal-Mart in America

Before we go any further, let us agree on a few things. First, Wal-Mart is an awful corporation. Second, many of us end up at Wal-Mart regardless of that first fact due to any number of reasons — geography, selection, hours, sadness, boredom, etc.. Third, writing anything on the internet is perceived by racist commenters as an invitation to blindly spew hate, even if it's about something as innocuous as umbrellas, but the cowardly and ignorant most definitely brush their Confederate flags aside and earnestly get to action on the keyboard when you talk about the intersection of economics and social classes at America's bargain basement hellhole. (Which is ironic because until this summer, it was one of the few places you could reliably find the racist flag for sale.) Yelp reviews bare out all those truths and more in stark 1-star reviews filled with bile and worse. Which is all by way of saying if you comment here or on Facebook, keep your racist comments to yourself.

Now that all that's out of the way...

It should be said and it should be said publicly and it should be said forcefully:

The Steelyard Wal-Mart Supercenter is the worst Wal-Mart in America. 

If you do a quick Google search, that title, at least when it comes to search engine optimization and previous righteous tirades, is currently held by the Wal-Mart in Martinsburg, West Virginia. We not so humbly beg to differ. There's really no comparison.

We'd regale you with the blow-by-blow that got us to this breaking point, but you've likely been there yourself. The lines that stretch across an acre or two as two cashiers do the best they can as a manager looks on with complete indifference. The pervasive lack of concern for anything resembling customer service so widespread and institutionalized that it couldn't be casual or coincidence, that the only possible explanation is a mandatory seminar all employees take to learn how to be so completely inept at even the most basic aspects of their job. The shelves that never seemed stocked, and when they are, stocked in such a manner as to create a portrait of a forsaken wasteland long shuttered from public view, the consumer version of ruin porn shots of defunct amusement parks or condemned warehouses. The waits. The waits for literally anything. To be rung up. To get photos. To have paint mixed. To, god forbid, check the inventory of an item not on the shelf. The parking lot, a cemetery of mish-moshed metal left over, we imagine, from a failed and abandoned experiment to build a Transformer entirely out of shopping carts. The store itself a miracle, an unobserved island of the Walton empire that they have long since forgotten about and probably assume had already closed.

That is all. It's the worst. Please don't shop there. Don't make the same mistakes we've made.