What is it Like to go to Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve?

It’s probably not as bad as you’re imagining it to be. While malls and the like are swarmed with the hopelessly desperate and seasoned-out seasoners, the people you find at Wal-Mart forty minutes before it closes on Christmas eve are a quiet, doleful lot already resigned to their holiday failures. If the mob scene at malls are the war that ends the world, then the people at Wal-Mart the day before Christmas are the shuffling society that creeps out after the apocalypse. All the good food is long gone, and anything that could have ever been a bare necessity has been stripped from the shelves, like hurricane season in Florida. You can still find apple cider and deodorant though, so I came out ahead.