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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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askchapo
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Every so often on long road trips I'll stop in to a walmart and wander around to get snacks and shake out my legs, and then completely lose track of space and time. I'll be looking at a wall of gatorades and realize I don't know what state I'm in, what year it is, where I came from, where I'm going. I'm simply in wal-mart. The wal-mart. The wal-mart that exists at the confluence of all possible wal-marts. The ultimate liminal space, the place where reality melts in to impossibility.
Costco does that to me. They're extremely consistent with only a few different internal layouts. And I used to go to one as a kid every 1-2 weeks, and now I rarely go, so I always feel like I'm in my hometown's Costco.
I know there's a stereotype about american walmarts, but holy shit were they weird when i used to tour. 3am, in between towns, just going in to grab some microwave food and chips, and it felt disorienting. Just the most bland lighting possible with the bottom rung of society wandering its aisles, looking for the next cheap hit of fat and salt, slowly being ground down by life itself. Absolutely wild to an outsider like me.
Been there, totally get it. There's a lot of small towns you can drive through that give the same feel, as well. Once you get away from the metropolises and surrounding suburban sprawl. Like they're all trapped in the architectural styles of decades past that the present day has forgotten.
It's a shame that we've become so inured to the superstore because they are such strange and surreal places. If you put a medieval peasant in one for 15 minutes they would go back and found a whole new religion
It's called a cargo cult, dad, and we already had those!
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