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Fear and Loathing In Small Town Walmart

When real life is interrupted, all the sudden your priors & ideology meet a reality check. Some folks are not fairing well with that reality

Andrew Donaldson
7 min readJun 30, 2020
Photo by MikeMozartJeepersMedia via Wikimedia Commons

Having traversed from the Carolina house down in the pines back up to my mountain Up Yonder brought a few things into focus. Because it’s just how life works, immediately upon arriving in my hometown, I discovered what I thought was a fix for the laptop had, in fact, become a fatal wound. Thus, off to the only place in town where one can acquire high-end technology on short notice in a town of 2800 folks at 8pm on a Saturday night.

Off to Walmart.

I know this Walmart well. I worked here when it first opened, the large Gateway Supercenter having replaced the smaller one across the street 20-odd years ago. It’s a job I enjoyed so much that after 6 months of it I enlisted in the military just to get out of there. But it was a valuable interlude between the college dropout/thrown out and the turning around of my life that occurred some years later. It was also eventful, as I recounted with Ruby, who had been there nearly 30 years now she reminded me, going back to the original store. We swapped stories and “remember whens” as she checked me out at the electronics register, having scoured the secured…

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Andrew Donaldson
Andrew Donaldson

Written by Andrew Donaldson

Writer. Mountaineer diaspora. Veteran. Managing Editor @ordinarytimemag on culture & politics, food writing @yonderandhome, Host @heardtellshow & other media

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