Submitted 2 years ago by STRIKINGdebate2@lemmy.world to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/083ce86b-667f-4c1d-9989-1516d0dadcb0.jpeg
I travel all over for work, and often dive into Walmarts for quick replenishment of supplies, and they vary widely. Some are nicer, like this one (oh yeah, this is about as good as they get), but some are all beat up, with really messed up floors.
Depending on where you are, some have a lot of stuff locked up in lucite boxes.
But yeah, it’s Walmart, they suck.
How is this mildly infuriating
It’s mildly infuriating because op doesn’t like the color scheme, therefore it’s “run down”
If you eat inflammatory foods every day, anything can be mildly infuriating
If this is “run down” I wanna see what you would consider normal.
So in other words “yes” 😁. Honestly the floors look clean, stuff is on shelves, I have no idea what OP is complaining about.
I assume they mean more like… Sterile? Walmart always puts me off by how cold and uninviting it is. Just a white warehouse with metal shelves, fluorescent lights, and linoleum floors. There’s no life to them like other smaller stores.
You had me zooming in looking for something. Like others have said, this is the “passing the savings along to you” look.
Target is a little more lively with an actual ceiling and brighter color scheme, but it’s really the same thing with a little extra polish.
This is a Giant Supermarket. Same overall feel as the Walmart, but slightly less warehouse like to make things look more appetizing.
Aldi has done a pretty good job of remodeling. It’s a value brand store where just about everything is store label, and it used to look rougher than Walmart. Now it’s become almost trendy and chic, but prices are still good. Makes the others really look like penny pinchers.
Aldi has really cleaned up it’s act in the last decade or so, but so have all the other grocery stores in my area. Customers want to have a luxury feel and passing along the savings really isn’t necessary if supermarkets syndicate themselves properly.
I love Aldi and it’s where I get 75% or so of my groceries. I enjoy cooking, so it’s easy to get basic quality ingredients there, and I’ll grab the occasional prepared food as a treat, especially during German week!
They’ve expanded their offerings and still manage a good price. We’ve gotten there ground bison and lamb and dinner frozen duck breasts that have all been great. I like their flake style imitation crab. They have some good seasonal offerings.
Their not having any name brands seems to help them beat the price collusion the other stores have. Giant has bought out most of the stores near me, which doesn’t help, but I buy little enough there I don’t complain much about it.
Seriously though, what’s wrong with them? Have I been living in a dump and not realizing it?
This is how most supermarkets (Walmart/Kroger/Target, etc.) in the U.S. look brand new - they’re effectively warehouses that sell product directly to customers. Smaller shops and boutiques have finished ceilings that hide the ductwork and such because they’re meant to be more flexible commercial/office space, but large stores like this do not, except for specialized locations like electronics, jewelery, or pharmacy, that can be gated off from the rest of the inside of the building for reduced operation and security.
Ignorant American here: what looks “run down” about it?
Looks like a normal grocery store to me. If you want run down looking you should see what family dollar stores look like.
Or a K-Mart. Any of them.
LOL what K-Mart? They’re (rightfully) long gone.
It was the first store I thought of but I haven’t seen one in years. The ones here made family dollar look good and Walmart look upscale.
Yeah dollar stores are the worst. They usually only have 1 or 2 employees and everything is everywhere. I don’t blame the employees, the store management needs to hire enough people to staff the fucking things.
Latest John Oliver on Dollar stores:
WDYM run down? Bro that looks really good.
DAE Murica sux? XDXDXD
As a retail manager, it looks fine? If the people in front of you are all waiting to check out, they should probably grab people from other departments to cover a few extra registers for a bit, but the store itself looks nice to me.
Why open more registers when you can push people towards self-checkour? As a retail manager you should be trying to get your customers to work for you for free whenever possible.
I don’t know anyone that actually thinks like that at store level.
Boy oh boy. Go to some of the save-a-lots in Cleveland OH. You’ll see the “run down” feeling. It’s just supposed to be the cheapest store to buy stuff, which makes sense they don’t go all out
This can’t be a walmart in america, where are the 50 american flags?
It’s not, it’s a Meijer (Midwest chain).
If you think this is run down, check out John Oliver’s recent piece on “dollar stores” in the US
Our Walmart had the tile floor, and choose to remove it to expose the raw concrete during a remodel.
European here: looks perfectly normal to me.
Same, looks identical to what I’d see here in Australia.
Based on your and the other guy's comment this sounds like European/Old-World identity bias (and a bit of availability bias); Assuming that other countries within one's group-identity are very similar and [non-European country] is a lone standout when it comes to some aspect that one just learned they differ on. It's so common to see these kinds of comments on posts of the form 'why do American's do this one weird thing different than everyone else'.
Yes, that’s actually better than most.
Are those stains or shadows?
Yes
Looks like a typical Walmart.
That is from the dystopian hellscape that is known as Walmart lol, not all shops look this way but it is an extra depressing take on big box stores.
Pretty much par for the course for a Walmart/any other store like it. Also they look exactly the same in Canada. Cruddy lighting, cheap beige laminate floors… Bleh.
Nah, usually some of the lights are out and there is mushy spots on the ceiling.
It’s literally a Walmart dawg
Walmarts and FoodMaxx usually are.
In the US I don’t really shop at a lot of these big name department/supermarket stores but I appreciate the deprioritization of superfluous building fashion.
But from what I understand, if you compare our hospitals to those abroad and the values are flipped on their head. We have granite marble waterfront facilities with grand fountains in the lobby and the patients and health care staff are treated like ass, we have poor outcomes that bankrupt us. But at least the place we shouldn’t want to be in look sharp.
Hmm. I wonder if our hospital architecture affects medical staff’s attitude toward patients. Perhaps hospitals should be more down to earth, to elevate the patients, like the Temple of the Human Spirit
I don’t think the medical staff is the issue, from what I can tell it’s leadership, organizational and financial priorities that are setting health care workers up for failure.
You should see Walmart in Canada. Makes US Walmart look like a luxury store.
Dude, you’re in a Walmart. You can’t have peopleofwalmart.com AND have a polished ceiling. There’s a reason their stuff is so cheap.
Yes.
There are some retailers that put a lot of money into making the experience of shopping enjoyable and more pleasant (Nike, Lulu Lemon, Apple, etc.) and their storefronts thrive.
Walmart, the store you pictured, thrives because they sell cheap.
When you shop at big box stores, the money leaves the community and goes to the wealthy 0.01%ers.
But the evil of their methods is that typically once they move in there’s literally no other options left. Everything else either goes out of business or your wages drop so low you can’t afford anything else.
These are a blight on American society.
These types of stores didn’t used to be possible for various reasons. But regulations and a focus on car-centrism have enabled this hellish combo of monopolistic box stores that can pop up, kill the competition and leave a wasteland behind in which it is both financially and legally impossible for the local population to bring back local stores.
Local stores tend to be in the older town areas where dense-buildings were legal. These get bought up and flattened and replaced with a mcdonalds or a gas station while the walmartification is in full swing. Then once walmart implodes there because no one can afford it anymore, walmart closes and the other chains close as well. No one can afford to replace walmart or the gas stations at scale for the obnoxious amount of land they use, but they also can’t replace them with more dense buildings because its literally illegal.
I think it’s a size thing. At some point it just doesn’t make sense to put in a lowered ceiling, because it costs a lot of money for no purpose and still looks like shit. Large stores in Europe also have visible airducts and supports etc.
Also, some malls have rules for what tenants are allowed to do with it, either for safety reasons (water sprinklers/fire alarms) or just because they don’t want to repaint or remove whatever the tenant did with it before they went bankrupt.
Devi@kbin.social 2 years ago
I'm not in the US but what makes you feel this is run down?
STRIKINGdebate2@lemmy.world 2 years ago
The ceiling looks incomplete with no wall and the color scheme is drab and dreary.
akilou@sh.itjust.works 2 years ago
For large chains in the suburbs this is totally normal. They’re basically warehouses in a sea of parking lots filled with shelves and racks. Sometimes there’s carpeted areas in between the tile walkways or displays that go up high enough that it feels enclosed. For smaller or more urban stores, you don’t see this kind of construction.
Mamertine@lemmy.world 2 years ago
You’re in a Walmart.
They claim to be cheaper so they can have that drabby distopian look.
In the good parts of town, they look nicer. In the poor parts of town they’re legit worse than that.
Fwiw, I’ll pay the extra dollar per shopping cart for the superior look of a target. Target is generally cleaner and crisper looking. As always there are exceptions to that rule.
kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 2 years ago
The “unfinished” ceilings are common in warehouse stores. It is largely a feature of practicality. Since electrical, water and ventilation typical run overhead and needs to be serviced occasionally, putting drop ceiling tiles up would make them difficult to work with, particularly when you need a scissor lift (rather than a ladder) to reach the utility lines. But it also has some benefits like higher lighting fixtures which means less direct/more ambient lighting, fewer places for pests to roam in the building or dust to build up, etc. It may just be that I’m used to it, but it doesn’t bother me as an aesthetic. Do ceiling is more common in smaller stores.
Not sure what you mean by the drab colors. The floor looks like it could be whiter and probably needs a polish, but the blues look nice enough to me. There’s not much to decorate though as most of the story is wide open with very few surfaces that aren’t covered in products for sale.
FoundTheVegan@kbin.social 2 years ago
Oh yeah, this is super standard. Honestly I had to scroll down to find what was even notable to you about this picture. I live in a major city and basically every store I go in to looks identical to this.
BrainisfineIthink@lemmy.one 2 years ago
That’s not run down, that’s a warehouse. Is it falling apart? Is the flooring worn? Are the walls cracking? Ceilings leaking? That’s what run down means, not whatever your weird complaint is about the decor and color scheme is.
isthingoneventhis@lemmy.world 2 years ago
This is totally normal for Walmart to look like. It’s basically a warehouse with extra steps.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Ceiling design is intentional, it’s cheap and it maintains temperature much better than a drop ceiling or whatever else you’d want up there.
Walmart normally has skylights too to let in natural light but I can’t see any in the pic. That looks like a poorly maintained Walmart.
Deceptichum@kbin.social 2 years ago
Can you show us what you think they should look like?
Coz I’ve seen Americans, Australians, and Europeans call this normal looking. So I’d love to see what you think isn’t.
Sabata11792@kbin.social 2 years ago
That's just a default Walmart, unironically.
Iamdanno@lemmynsfw.com 2 years ago
That ceiling is supposed to be that way. The insulation is on top of the roof deck, and the lack of a suspended ceiling gives it a more open feel. That’s why they painted all of the roof structure white (it also allows them to use less power for lighting). Walmart has a lot of problems, but store design isn’t one (although retail layout is, IMO).
Devi@kbin.social 2 years ago
We have a few of these warehouse type shops in the UK, Costco, Matalan, that sort of thing, it's not styled like a high street shop would be.
Uranium3006@kbin.social 2 years ago
that's pretty common for big box stores. they're put up cheaply and the buildings are only rated to last 15 years in some cases.
xor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
the open ceiling is brutalist design… pretty sure this is a WalMart and they all look like that….
it’s just a lot easier to maintain, and nobody looks at the ceiling
mp3@lemmy.ca 2 years ago
It’s a Wal-Mart so yeah, that’s normal.
higgsone@lemmy.world 2 years ago
This would be not even run down in Germany. Even the worst store here looks better than this.
sausager@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I believe you but can you post a picture, I’m curious what they look like there.