I found myself in the aisles of a remarkably quiet Walmart in Merced, California, on Friday. I had travelled there from San Francisco, where I live, because I wanted to see what Black Friday looked like in one of the most economically depressed parts of the country; Merced, in California’s Central Valley, had the nation’s third-highest unemployment rate in August, more than thirteen per cent.
Merced’s Walmart sits on a tree-lined commercial corridor called West Olive Avenue, a two-mile stretch populated largely by big-box retailers. To one side of Walmart, a Best Buy, an Applebee’s, and a Barnes & Noble huddle together; to the other is the Merced County Food Bank. I had braced myself for crowds of tense shoppers. But when I pulled up in the Walmart parking lot in the morning, it was only half full. Inside, families ambled about almost sleepily, as if still under the effects of tryptophan.
A woman wearing pajamas bought two matching bottles of Head & Shoulders shampoo. An elderly woman stopped mid-aisle, and was comparing pillows (two dollars and fifty cents each) by pressing her fingers into them. Another woman cherry-picked Hollywood blockbuster Blu-ray DVDs (three dollars and ninety-six cents each). I found a middle-aged married couple in the electronics section, who assured me they weren’t there to shop: “We came here to watch the madness, but there’s nothing much happening.” (Hours later, I saw them leave with a cart full of household goods. “I guess we couldn’t help but join in,” the husband said.) When I stood in line to buy a reporter’s notebook for twenty-nine cents, the cashier commented that it was her lowest ring of the day. I asked her if it had been busy, and she replied, “Not today. Today is just like any other day.” […]
Some of the lowest-paid workers in the nation are, of course, those who work at Walmart itself. On Friday, employees protested at Walmarts across the nation, asking for higher wages, an increase in the percentage of full-time employees, and access to health care, among other demands. At Merced’s Walmart, there were no such protests to be seen. Brandon Baker, nineteen years old, told me that he was grateful to have work. A seasonal employee, he has been working at Walmart for about four weeks. He had been searching for work for two years, he said, and after the holidays he will go back to being unemployed. “I went to so many interviews before I got this job,” he told me. “One place told me I had to cut off all my facial hair, which I didn’t want to do, because I look like a little boy with no facial hair. But I did it anyway just to get the job, and they still didn’t hire me. That was at Panda Express; I was devastated.”
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