Wal-Mart also allows layaways near Christmas time, which lets people pay for their items in increments over 8-12 weeks. People will research to find out when it starts and plan the items that they’re going to get on layaway. This makes people think that they’re getting a deal, when they’re really not. They could have saved a certain amount each month and then buy it but because of the low price and the idea of layaway it creates the illusion that they’re getting a bargain. I overheard several people talking about getting stuff on layaway while in the store on Black Friday, and I know some people that wait for it every year, like clockwork. Since I went on Black Friday it was a bit different than normal, but when I usually go there to shop I notice that a lot of people who have a cart load full of groceries have one child or more and …show more content…
I think they do this at Wal-Mart because the prices are so low, that they can get an abundance of it to last them until they get more food stamps or get paid. It’s also a ‘good’ place to go for college students because of the cheap prices. Some college students also work there to help pay for their education, but because of low wages it doesn’t help a great deal. Kind of harkening back to my first point of normalcy, it’s become such a mundane part of our life that even when Wal-Mart is caught in a scandal it doesn’t even register in our brains that ‘oh I should stop shopping there.’ We’ve become so desensitized to immoral things happening in the world that when the problem of Wal-Mart using sweatshops came up we just passed it off as normal; Apple uses them, Forever 21, the GAP. It doesn’t even faze us anymore, that’s just life. “Wal-Mart, the ultimate infantile citizen, appears as innocent, beneficial, and normal, as a gentle giant that replenishes our optimism for the American Dream, even as structural forces, among them Wal-Mart, increasingly block its realization” (119). It’s seen as beneficial to the economy and to the