Wal-Marathon

Visions of shoppers pushing carts and employees in blue vests stocking shelves under fluorescent lights haunted my dreams for the next few nights after my recent visit to Wal-Mart.

I set out to spend 24 hours in the Chico Wal-Mart to see if the store could meet my every need. Could I eat, sleep, bathe and entertain myself for one rotation of the earth all under the roof of this massive institution of consumerism?

It’s not the first time somebody has set out to live in a Wal-Mart. Skyler Bartels, a Drake University student, spent 41 hours in a Wal-Mart in Windsor Heights, Iowa (although it was a Supercenter, equipped with a hair salon and a Subway). And Novalee Nation, Natalie Portman’s character in Where the Heart Is, set up camp in a Wal-Mart for two months before popping out a baby in the store.

I didn’t set out to be sneaky and actually called the Wal-Mart corporate media relations office. I received a message on my cell phone from one of the media relations people saying Wal-Mart would not welcome my staying 24 hours in a store. The request probably seemed a little strange, as the PR guy wanted to make sure he understood the message correctly: “If I have misinterpreted the note, please let us know,” the voice said.

He didn’t misinterpret anything.

The parking lot was about a quarter full when I arrived at the 120,000-square-foot shopping mecca. I walked through the door at exactly 8 a.m. and was greeted by a polite older gentleman wearing a blue vest with “How may I help you?” emblazoned on the back.

I was hungry, so I headed through the sliding glass doors to McDonald’s.

Behind the golden arches I ordered hash browns and a cup of coffee with cream and sugar. The coffee was a lot better and stronger than I expected. After about 15 minutes, the soles of my shoes started tapping uncontrollably on the tile floor, and not because of the good music playing on the Wal-Mart radio.

I thought about making a schedule, and figured that I could probably spend 20 minutes in each aisle. Some aisles, like books and magazines and electronics would be much more interesting and time-consuming, I thought.

The first thing that struck my fancy was trying on every pair of sunglasses in the store. Throughout my stay I would end up testing out a lot of merchandise, but I paid for everything I used. Among my purchases were a washcloth, a toothbrush, travel-sized toothpaste, body wash, deodorant and a T-shirt printed with Marilyn Monroe’s face (OK, maybe not an essential need, but it was cute and cheap).

Wandering through the front of the store, I landed on the books and magazines aisle and saw two teenagers sitting on the floor reading. The aisle was a bit of a disappointment; the majority of the books in the section were romance novels, and Wal-Mart carries only the most mainstream magazines. I settled on the latest copy of Vogue and sat on the floor and read alongside the teens.

No one seemed to care how long I sat on the floor reading, although I do feel a little guilty about reading magazines cover-to-cover without paying the newsstand price. After about an hour and a half of sitting Indian-style on the floor, my legs started getting cramped, so I set out in search of some physical activity.

There were too many people in the store to ride a bike, so I grabbed a big bubblegum-pink orb and had a ball bouncing it around the aisles. I got quite a few strange looks from employees and customers, but I was having too much fun to care.

While browsing the pet aisles, I watched a Wal-Mart employee catching a silvery white koi for a customer who owned a pond. The guppy swam fast to get away from the net, and when the employee finally cornered it, the fish flopped its way out of the net onto the floor. The employee quickly scooped up the koi and dumped it into the plastic tank.

“It’s OK,” the employee said. “There’s a three-day warranty on the fish.”

Both of the men turned their backs on the plastic tank for a second, and the fish leapt out of the tank and onto the floor for the second time.

The employee put the fish back in the main tank and told the customer he would get him a different one.

“No, I want that one,” the man said. “He’s tough.”

After the employee finally wrangled the fish into a bag, he asked me if I wanted one.

I didn’t.

“They’re better with butter and salt anyway,” he said.

Spending many hours in Wal-Mart made it easy to lose all track of time. The fluorescent lights are always on, and there are no windows other than in the very front of the store. I found that the garden section was a great place to go for some fresh air and to get whiff of the world outside the Wal-Mart universe.

Whenever I got tired of standing, I would sit down on a futon (on clearance for $80) in the furniture section. It was surprisingly comfortable and located out of most of the employees’ ways. When I started off this experiment, I was a bit paranoid about getting caught. But, as the day went on, I realized that the employees who noticed that I had been in the store for their entire shifts were more amused than anything. One employee walked by the couch and said, “We should just set up a TV here for you.”

“That would be nice,” I replied.

Another employee jokingly offered to bring me pillows and blankets.

Around midnight, I went to the restroom and freshened up by brushing my teeth, washing my face and changing my clothes. I got a little nervous when an employee walked into the restroom while I was brushing my teeth, but she just looked me over and decided to ignore me.

Less than halfway through my 24-hour stint, I ran into a big problem. My cell phone, my only watch and source of communication with the outside world, was dying. I searched the electronics department for a car charger or an extra battery, but the store didn’t carry anything that would work with my phone. My roommate saved the day by bringing me my cell phone charger. I realized that all the pillars that support the ceiling also house electrical outlets. The shoe department was relatively unoccupied, so I decided to charge my phone while trying on every pair of shoes in the aisle.

For several hours in the middle of the night, there was no one shopping. A man, probably in his 70s, was looking for cat food at 2 a.m. A woman holding a bag of Hershey’s Kisses walked by, eating out of the bag. When she saw me looking at her, she clamped both her hands around the bag as if to hide it.

I looked for a place to sleep. No one was working in the garden section, so I lay down on some patio furniture, only to have a man stocking come in and disturb me. So I moved back to my favorite futon and relaxed and watched the people work.

Eventually I got so sleepy that I pulled the brim of my hat down over my eyes and attempted to doze off. Finally, at 5:20 a.m. a manager-looking man clad in a khaki T-shirt politely said, “I have to ask you to leave.”

Without the slightest hesitation, I agreed. I’d successfully stayed for 21 hours and 20 minutes.

“I was going to see how long you could last but … “

I was out of Wal-Mart before he could finish his sentence.