Vehicles sit parked outside a Wal-Mart store in Louisville, Ky. In 2015, as in years past, Wal-Mart sales floors provided the setting for stories of joy, heartbreak, pathos and protest.
Much like most Americans, Josseleen Lopez spent her holidays eating. On the menu for her last Tuesday, for instance, was wine, sushi, cinnamon rolls and an entire rotisserie chicken with sauce. An all-American meal.
The location of her feast was admittedly a little unconventional. Lopez, 25, allegedly indulged while cruising in a motorized shopping cart inside a Wal-Mart store in Lecanto, Fla. She was arrested on shoplifting and drug paraphernalia charges after an employee spotted her, local news outlets reported Sunday.
According to the Citrus County Sheriff's Office, Lopez consumed $32.36 worth of food and wine. She also allegedly carried in her purse and backpack two empty syringes, which she told detectives had been used to inject crystal meth. Lopez reportedly said she was homeless.
Drugs were her downfall; food, a temporary relief. This familiar sad tale was newsworthy only because it occurred on a Wal-Mart sales floor, so often the setting for stories of joy, heartbreak, pathos and protest. If all the world's a stage, Wal-Mart in America is the largest set by far: 775,425,188 square feet if you count Sam's Club.
As of Nov. 30, the United States houses 4,655 Wal-Mart retail units, many of them discount department stores and supermarkets rolled into one. The number of Target stores is just about one-fourth that total. In a country of convenient consumption, Wal-Mart is your proverbial one-stop-shop, but we continue to act surprised when an event unrelated to shopping, yet inextricably tied to everyday American life, happens to occur within its walls.
John Lennon famously crooned, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." Sometimes - more often than most people think - life is what happens to you while you're simultaneously looking for kid's birthday party decorations and bulk Alfredo sauce.
One of the year's most tragic inside-Wal-Mart stories happened a couple days before 2015 actually began, in an Idaho store where a young mother was shopping with her three children. Her 2-year-old son sat in the shopping cart, where Veronica Rutledge, the mother, had also placed her purse. Inside the purse was a gun.
Rutledge was looking at electronics when the shot was fired, her toddler inadvertently pulling the trigger on the bullet that pierced his 29-year-old mother's skull and ended her life.
The store in Hayden, Idaho, was evacuated, and Wal-Mart recognized the "very sad incident" in a short statement. It happened five days after Christmas, two before New Year's. It became a symbolic end to a year tragically rife with accidental shootings by children and an increasingly heated national debate about gun legislation.
"They carried [a gun] every day of their lives, and they shot extensively," Rutledge's father-in-law, Terry Rutledge, said of the victim and her husband in an interview with The Washington Post the following day. "They loved it. Odd as it may sound, we are gun people."
The incident wasn't the only shooting to take place in or around a Wal-Mart. In April, an Arizona family assaulted a Wal-Mart employee and proceeded to disarm and shoot a police officer who arrived on the scene. Three members of the family were known for being a part of the Christian band Matthew 24 Now.
Elsewhere, stores went into lockdown and customers were terrorized by a gunman who threatened to shoot. The year before, amid roiling tensions over police brutality towards African Americans, a 22-year-old black man named John Crawford III was shot to death by an officer in an Ohio Wal-Mart after picking up a pellet gun from the store's sporting goods section.
Wal-Mart provided the setting for other political debates, too. This November, a Mississippi man was charged with throwing an explosive device into a Wal-Mart allegedly in protest of the fact that the chain ceased to sell the Confederate flag.
"He said he didn't like their policies and that they were anti-American," Tupelo Police Chief Brian Aguirre told The Post. The device didn't do any damage, but it got its message across: to remove the Confederate flag from Wal-Mart, of all places, was an affront to the country that made it possible for the retail giant to thrive.
While Wal-Mart became the end of the road for some, it was the very beginning for others. This past year, at least two babies were born inside stores: one in Tennessee, and another in Alabama.
In 2013, four babies were born inside Wal-Mart stores.
The stories read like the plot of "Where the Heart Is," a novel and 2000 movie starring Natalie Portman as a pregnant teenager who ends up living and giving birth inside an Oklahoma Wal-Mart. The in-store delivery makes her character, Novalee, somewhat of a celebrity, garnering a $500 cash gift from the Wal-Mart president.
This may have been on the mind of a woman who handed a newborn girl, amniotic fluid and all, to a couple in a Colorado Wal-Mart parking lot in January. The couple proceeded to drop the infant off at a nearby fire station, one of the state's designated "safe havens" where a parent can relinquish a baby, unharmed, without being subject to prosecution. Wal-Mart didn't make the list.
Life, Death. What's Next?Why, love.For years, a Wal-Mart store in Fort Smith, Ark., had been Renate Stumpf's place of work. This past February, it became the spot where she said "yes" - again - to her 75-year-old ex-husband.
Stumpf, also 75, was standing in the pasta aisle, just below a sign that read "LOW PRICE $1.50," when Louis Demetriades walked up behind her with a large sign that read: "Happy Valentine's Day! Will you marry me?"
The couple met at an army base in Germany when they were both 18, married, moved to the United States and had three children, according to ABC. The union ended 13 years later and was only reignited in December 2014, after each of their respective second spouses passed away.
"The love has never passed," Stumpf told ABC.
Wal-Mart seems to have a particular romantic cachet among the elderly. Two years ago, Wal-Mart employees Don Evans and Lois Free wed in front of the bike rack in the Idaho store where they met in 2012, after their former spouses both died the year before.
Evans worked in the bike section, and Free in sporting goods. After they ceremony, they wheeled away in electric shopping carts with pop cans dangling from the backs.
"Our circle of friends is a Wal-Mart, Evans told the Coeur d'Alene Press. "They're like an extended family. Having it here made it nice. She asked management and they said, 'Of course.' So here we are."
Not everyone is enthusiastic enough about Wal-Mart to exchange vows inside one of its stores. When President Barack Obama spoke at a San Jose Wal-Mart in September of 2014, praising the store for energy efficiency, he was roundly criticized by labor union members and activists who said that Wal-Mart's historically low-wage jobs have played a major role in the income gap that the president is supposedly trying to bridge.
Politics aside, sometimes Wal-Mart does provide shelter, temporarily and inadvertently, for the wayward.
A 45-year-old Michigan woman took shelter for at least 2 days in a 24-hour Wal-Mart after her son kicked her out of their shared home because of her drinking problem. She was "evicted" after employees noticed her on security cameras, ABC 30 reported, but even then she displayed a steadfast resolve to stay right where she was.
When police officers arrived, they found her sitting in a chair using her laptop, with headphones in her ears.
"Save Money," check. "Live Better?" The jury's divided on that.
Perhaps she learned about camping out in Wal-Mart from a 14 year old runaway who made himself at home for 54 hours at a Wal-Mart in Corsicana, Tex., the year before. He had just about everything he needed - a makeshift bed buried behind boxes, some snacks, a pet fish. Ultimately, it was a trail of trash that gave him up, according to reports.
"I'm really - I'm surprised somebody hasn't already been doing that because they have everything," shopper Lou Walter told NBC DFW at the time. "You can exist in Wal-Mart."
© 2015 The Washington Post