Well, That Was An Adventure...

What with all the Christmas rush, and my brother being in the hospital, I had forgotten to blog about our little Walmart adventure a couple of weeks ago...

The girls and I went grocery shopping that Saturday morning, as we usually do (though most times it's just me). The store was crazy busy, due to the holiday shopping, I guess - it's not usually that bad when I do my food shopping.

We were just about done, getting the last couple of things from the frozen aisles, when we smelled something that smelled just like burning hair. Eww. We looked around, but didn't see anyone looking too panicked about it, and couldn't see any smoke or anything, so we finished shopping & walked over to the registers. We usually use the Self-checkout lines, but when we got to those, there were 4 or 5 Walmart employees standing near them, looking at the top area of one of them. Still no smoke, but the smell was stronger there, so we weren't about to risk trying to use one.

We went to the other end of the registers, to one of the regular ones, & got in line. Right when we got up to where we could unload the cart & pay for our stuff, they started evacuating the store.
Damn. Soooo close. We had to leave the cart there while they cleared the store, so we went outside and waited. If it wasn't too long, I wasn't leaving without going back in for my stuff - after I had spent 2 hours shopping, because some of what we had gotten was Christmas presents.

They had us get all the way away from the building, so we sat in our car and waited, while the 3 firetrucks sat at the entrances to the store, and we watched the firefighters look for something to fight. They walked around on the roof, and looked into some areas that must have been access doors or something, and I'm sure some of them were inside the regular part of the store, checking it out.

After about 30 minutes, those of us who hadn't left were able to go back in & get our stuff. The cold food was still cold, so I didn't end up needing to swap anything out like I thought I might have to. The employees had to do a sweep of the store, and bring all the abandoned carts up to customer service. I bet they spent the rest of that day putting stuff back, too.

I have to say, as much as people rag on Walmart, the people working there handled the evacuation very well - they got it done quickly and safely once they knew it had to be done, and then got right back to work as soon as we were all allowed back in, and kept a decent attitude, even though they knew they were going to have a shitty afternoon picking up after all the people who had just left the carts full of stuff everywhere.

So that's our little adventure. I think I like regular boring days better. ;-p