I don’t care who you are, at some point in your life you’ve enjoyed the spoils of the most fabulous peddler of mass consumption on Earth, the Walmart. And if you’re one who sanctimoniously derides Walmart–saying you never shop there–then you shouldn’t be allowed to sit in lawn chairs or use storage bins or enjoy any of the other wonderful petroleum-based shit that Walmart’s influence causes to be priced super low at every other store in the country as well. Walmarts are the nondescript, mega square footage receptacles in which our nation’s gestalt gets distilled, displayed, and sold. I do believe, collectively, we are Walmart. If you don’t like it, actively do something about it. And buying Method soap or shopping at Whole Foods isn’t enough, either.
With that said, I’ll go ahead and introduce you to the super viral site peopleofwalmart.com (POW).
The site is so obvious it’s absurd. How many times have you been in a Walmart and seen some seriously insane shit that you wanted to show your friends? The young, enterprising men behind POW simply created a place for people to share those experiences and the rest took care of its self. Because finding freaks at Walmart is easier than scoring meth at a county fair. The problem you run into with a site like POW, though, is that it can easily turn into a place for the clumsily minded to bash the less fortunate and reinforce a lot of negative stereotypes. So long as the founders of the site stick to what they’ve promised, and not expressly make fun of people for being over weight, poor, or handicapped (I have not done any due diligence on this and taken their comments prima facie) then I think it’s relatively harmless. But brilliant? Absolutely not.
One thing I will complain about, though, is how shitty the POW photo captions are. It reminds me of LookAtThisFuckingHipster.com, another virally popular Tumblr-style site where desrving, alleged hipsters* get hung out to be ridiculed in all of their vainglorious ridiculousness. The photos on the site are great but the writing is complete tripe.
*None of these kids are actually hip at, with, or to anything.
Peopleofwalmart.com is the photo blog we’ve all thought about creating but never created. The site is simple, from what I can tell
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