My pillbox says it's Tuesday ...

   ... so I must be running the Walmart gauntlet later.
   The place never ceases to amaze me. The most recent wrinkle at the local wrinklefest is a return of the monster's offer to "lay away" purchases — a sad sign that more of us are living paycheck to paycheck and have lousy or nil credit.
  {For decades my oft brilliant eldest sister refers to the practice as "lay awake," because that's what you do after your initial deposit — lay awake figuring out how you're going to pay for the rest of it.}
   Simply entering the massive mass merchandiser can weigh a shopper down.
   After an initial nod to the cart minder, you step into the store and are immediately hit with stacks of stuff they want you to simply grab. Too huge to work into the checkout area, these massive displays nonetheless present the initial point of impulse buying.
   You are hit up with this cerebral pick-pocketing as you pause to think of what it is you came in for and where it is located in the store. Walmart provides no immediate [hold your breath, I'm going to say it] sinage to direct a customer to his/her/its destination; so you're forced into a semi-linger consciousness where, again, those massive displays of pizza, chips, notebooks, etc., gnaw upon your line of sight.
   Hence, Walmart is more of a semi-civil herding experience as the shopper/victim is pushed, pulled and peppered with stimuli throughout the cavernous maze.
   I can truly begin to understand how war vets just cannot go into the place; hell, I never served our country to know what war is like, but navigating the shopping mecca is an uncomfortable task at best, near manic at its worst and often unpredictable.
   I try to move through as quickly as possible but not in a pushy, brutish manner. I attempt to avoid jammed aisles, knots of yammering gossipers "catching up" on who's in jail and who's on parole until I can score what I came in for and weave toward the checkout line {what I consider the finish line}. And yet the MBAers behind the scenes haven't given up on selling me to buy more as the layaway pitch is hammered home once again, this time screeching at you from a tiny TV mounted on the register as you are trapped in line.
   I can't wait to get out and I hate shopping there, but if you have a family you do what it takes with the budget that you have.
   None of the talking heads or Beltway bozos will tell you that inflation is up, but ask any normal person who has children and the look on their face will tell the story.
   Of course you don't want to buy everything there; I'd say half of our budget is spent elsewhere because it's cheaper to do so. Walmart's focus is low prices on must have staples so you find yourself back in there, month in, month out, cursing under your breath, running the gauntlet for the family.
   Editor's note: The Salt Lake Tribune reports that Walmart's layaway scheme helped club Kmart into further submission. On Dec. 27, Kmart announced a raft of store closures after horrid seasonal sales. "Kmart’s layaway program, meant to help cash-strapped customers buy presents by paying for them a little at a time, faltered as Walmart brought back layaway for the holiday season after getting rid of the program in 2006."