Brown: Under the bright lights of Walmart, an economic story unfolds

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My mom can’t drive, so every week I take her to the Hibbing, Minn., Walmart. Mom’s resilience after her stroke is inspirational, but it takes her time to shop. This means I spend many more hours than a typical shopper observing life in Walmart.

What I’ve seen change in these aisles over the past few years tells a story about our demographic, economic and cultural future. We should pay attention and plan accordingly.

Let’s start, as one does, at the entrance. For many years, Walmart and most other retailers have offered mobility scooters for customers as a convenience. In the last year, the number of scooters available has jumped significantly, and they’re often in use. We’ve gotten so that Mom doesn’t count on using one.

As baby boomers grow older, our public places must become even more accessible. At some point, stoplights for scooters at the major aisle intersections wouldn’t surprise me.

I know that some people mock Walmart shoppers, an outcropping of the “People of Walmart” online memes. True, I’ve seen some odd things, both funny and disturbing. Some general advice: Formulate a shared plan for household spending before you arrive, seek grace and treat yourself with a cart that rolls straight.

Thus, at Walmart, I mostly see people getting by the best they can. The company positioned itself to appeal to low-income shoppers, but it also depends upon low wages to preserve low prices. In a small town, this creates a cycle of dependency. You need Walmart, because the majority of people who work at Walmart and places like it can’t really afford to shop elsewhere.

In Hibbing, Walmart is the last box store left in a town of 16,000 that once boasted two shopping malls and a busy downtown. But online options like Amazon are no less evil, and it’s hard for my mom to get to other stores. My family shops there often because it’s on the way home from town. People shop at Walmart out of perceived necessity, not because they love big corporations.

Another thing you should know about Walmart, if you haven’t shopped there lately, is how busy it is. Walmart’s annual sales figures increased about 5% last year, defying economic and retail trends and far outpacing Target, which saw a slight decline.

That was certainly the case in Hibbing, both before and after the holiday season. From what I observed, post-holiday bargain-seeking was arguably the busiest period in terms of foot traffic and parking.

Walmart and other discount retailers, such as Dollar General, have been safe harbors for consumers during more challenging economic times. Walmart’s CEO recently suggested that the company’s success stems from an uptick in middle-class shoppers looking for lower prices as their budgets are stretched.

I’ve observed that many of these middle-class shoppers choose to use free pickup using the Walmart app. This is true in Hibbing. By late afternoon, the row of parking spots designated for order pickups is usually full. One after another, workers roll out big bins of bagged goods, loading them into SUVs and minivans.

Inside the store, this manifests as its own kind of social commentary. Low-wage workers push those bins around, shopping on behalf of higher-wage workers, alongside low-wage and elderly shoppers. What started as a public health precaution during COVID-19 became a societal trend and is now a traffic jam in the grocery section.

The act of ordering online is another change, highly customized to the user. It’s not “What do you want?” Rather, it’s “How many 2-liter bottles of Diet Mountain Dew do you need this week?” For the highly routine-oriented consumer, you can literally order the exact same things every week and have them delivered to your door.

It almost reminds me of when my sisters and I were little, and my family had a milkman, long past the time this would have been common practice. We couldn’t afford it, but my mom had a hard time taking us to town and our car had a hard time making it home. The milkman was just like the online app. How many milks? Cheese this week? Do your kids like yogurt?

But our milkman was not an app. His name was John Dillon, and he knew all our names. I went to school with his daughter. He let us pay as we could and brought his old guns for my dad to fix.

And yet, we are still human.

One observation that you’ve probably made yourself is the prevalence of people engaging in speakerphone conversations while walking around the store.

It’s annoying as heck and I wish people wouldn’t do it, but there is a silver lining. People do this because they are tied by affection or blood to another person, a person who will likely help unload those groceries, hair scrunchies and giant stuffed octopi.