I'm one of those lucky people to have been blessed with a Wal-Mart in my neighborhood for going on 3 decades. Wal Mart opened its first store in the Louisville, KY area 20+ years ago in Crestwood. The store, which would probably fit nicely into the clothing section of the SuperCenters built today was a wonderful place to shop. Open from 10 to 9, the store was a perfect discount store for a small town, with good prices and friendly people.

I thought of this today as I grabbed a pack of cups out of my cabinet to get some water. They were the Wal-Mart brand, which I bought because it was cheap. I looked at the back and saw they were "Made In Mexico".

Nothing new, of course. Cups, toothpaste, housewares, clothes, and other items have been increasingly coming from across our borders for the past several years.

However, this put the spotlight on something that Wal-Mart used to carry in its back pocket as a great reason to shop there. It was saving American jobs. The Wal-Mart of my youth played up this fact in posters displayed throughout the store. Wal-Mart prided itself on giving contracts to television makers, bicycle makers, and garment manufacturers and rescuing the jobs there. I remember the signs counted the jobs that were saved.

The irony, of course, is that as Wal-Mart killed K-Mart and became the discounter in this country, the aggresive business tactics it championed eventually ensured that the jobs it saved would go elsewhere. Conspicuously absent from Wal-Mart these days about buying American. Save for the occasional note on the Sam's Choice products, the only American jobs that Wal-Mart is willing to hold onto seem to be the ones in its stores.

What also seems to be lost, at least in my experience, is the idea of the "hometown" Wal-Mart that is such an important part of their ads. As Wal-Mart has grown, it has gone from a nice place to shop to a place you go because you have to. My local Wal-Mart where I live now was built small and expanded, and still seems too small. The people that work there are less than friendly, the store is filthy (as are many in the Louisville area), the shelves are a mess, and the checkout lines are almost always backed up.

It's no wonder that Target has come on strong. Cheap chick has become the alternative of choice to those of us fed up with Wal-Mart. Target's clean, brightly lit stores, while not always as cheap as Wal-Mart, are places where the budget conscious among us can go and shop and enjoy ourselves.

Granted, Wal-Mart will not suffer financially anytime in the near future, and I'm probably in the minority of people who really have begun to hate shopping there. But I think that its general shift away from the things that once made it a pleasurable place to shop.


So what can Wal-Mart do to improve?

1) Clean up its stores. I've been to Wal-Marts that are nice and clean in other states, but most of them seem to be in smaller areas where the competition for labor isn't as great. In areas such as Louisville, where low paying jobs are a dime a dozen, Wal-Mart seems to get by with skeleton crews. Because the stores are open 24 hours and remain relatively busy that entire time, the stores have to be stocked, cleaned, and reconfigured on the fly. While it may not be feasible to shut down overnight, even a simple closure for a few hours once a week would work wonders to make the stores more pleasant to shop in.

2) New uniforms. Okay, this may sound dumb, but Wal-Mart's uniforms are absolutely horrible. They are 300% polyester and seem in danger of turning their wearers into human torches if they get to close to a heat source (like a warm blanket). Gas station attendents are better dressed.

3) Stock the crap you know people buy. I drink a LOT of soda. Because of this, I buy lots of cheap Sam's Choice Soda. Apparently lots and lots of people do the same, because they are ALWAYS out. Now Wal-Mart got where it was by tight inventory management. But I have to think that having enough Dr. Thunder on keep the shelves stocked throughout the course of the week isn't going to throw Wal-Mart on the downgraded stock list anytime soon.

4) Build more grocery only stores. We just recently got a new Wal-Mart neighborhood grocery, and I like it. The shelves are usually nicely stocked, the prices are great, and the store is much more pleasurable to shop in than the Super Duper Centers that combine groceries, housewares, gas stations, mortgage companies, paintball arenas, and OB/GYN services under one roof.

5) Get off your moral soapbox. On a recent trip to Wal-Mart, I found I could buy Grand Theft Auto (a violent, profane, sexist videogame full of sex, violence, and profanity), Body Double (a movie full of much of the same), and a number of Stephen King novels (chuck full of the same as well). For some reason, if you decide to sing about any of these same themes, Wal-Mart doesn't want you. WHile I appreciate Wal-Mart wanting to look out for children, I think I'd rather have my child have access to Eminem's latest than a movie where people are killed by a power drill or a game the main theme is how many crimes you can commit. Yeah, this probably won't save or make Wal-Mart much money, but it certainly does annoy me.