Walmart: The True Meaning Behind Thanksgiving

We didn’t shop on Thanksgiving, not wanting to be responsible for anyone having to work who would rather be home with family.

Nor did we shop on Black Friday, or Moron Day, as I like to call it, not wanting to be out with the crazy people, like those who stood in line with more than 500 other, um, shoppers, waiting to get into Toys R Us.

 

But we did shop for groceries on Wednesday, thick in the swarm of last-minute  food buyers looking for that last treat or two to top off their Turkey Day celebration. For us, grocery shopping almost always means Walmart. Here are some thoughts on my time in the store.

Those handful of people complaining so loudly that Walmart was out of big turkeys by 3 pm on Wednesday really don’t have anything to gripe about. It’s not like they didn’t know Thanksgiving was coming up.

You can buy turkey seasoning that comes with a hypodermic needle and syringe that lets you inject the stuff (ha ha) right into the bird. Doesn’t that seem wrong, somehow?

 

 

All of the frozen desert bins were hit hard, with lots of empty shelf space and very few of the really good pies left. Across the aisle, the so-called healthy frozen dinners-Smart Ones, Healthy Choice-had not been touched. Throughout the frozen entre section, most still looked fully stocked, except for the turkey dinners, which were mostly gone, too.

I made the assumption that anyone eating a frozen TV turkey dinner was likely alone for Thanksgiving. Is that a fair conclusion? It made me sad that so many people had nowhere better to go for the holiday than to the freezer for a Stouffer’s dinner.

Even turkey pot pies were nearly sold out, not just the Marie Callender’s, which are pretty good, but also the 88-cent Banquet pies. That really made me sad and kinda lonely as I pictured some elderly woman all on her own, again, or some college freshman, far from home and all by himself for the first time.

Then I realized that I was wrong. They may have been alone, but at least they had something. Even a cheap pot pie alone is better than nothing. It wasn’t that many years ago, alone in an empty duplex in some strange town, that all I had for Thanksgiving was generic grape jelly and a long, long weekend.

 

I’m thankful that has changed, and wish everyone had it as good as I do.

 

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Images swiped from here, here, here, and here.