“People go to Walmart just to beat their kids”
Simply untrue. While a kernel of truth exists in the supposition that child beating does take place in the aisles of this much-maligned corporate wildebeest, people go to Walmart, it seems, to shop. Now, while shopping, we (consciously or not) peel back layers to reveal our habits and routines in all their sometimes unpleasant glory. We are distracted by value.
If a psoriasis-sufferer scratches their head incessantly, they will continue to do so while shopping for lunchmeat, socks, scented candles, etc. It’s not necessarily a byproduct of the occupied mind, but rather runs a separate (if parallel) path; the scratching has everything to do with reflex and the belief, however brief, that one is alone. It’s what happens when the wormhole of value vacuity hijacks our synapses.
This is not to single out Walmart; almost all forms of shopping involve a degree of attentiveness rarely seen in other spheres of everyday “maintenance” existence. Shopping involves any number of the following focused activities: evaluating, comparing, remembering, choosing and navigating. Simultaneously, one with child(ren) needs to safeguard their well-being, monitor their behavior and inventively provide them with a cavalcade of diversions. As illustrated by child-beating, injury or pain certainly constitutes a diversion.
So the child-beater, like our head-scratcher, will continue to beat on a near-subconscious level. People don’t go to Walmart simply to beat, though it appears Walmart is an almost-perfect, acoustically-prohibitive, emphatically-public and intrinsically-agitated platform upon which to do so.
Now people DO go to Walmart to swear at their children. That’s just common sense.
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