Jessica McDonald: Feeling My Way through Walmart

Music: “Ebb and Flow” by Dyalla

I. Childhood: Growing up in Walmart

00:25 Jessica McDonald: I grew up in a Walmart. More specifically, I grew up in the aisles of the Confederation Mall Walmart on Treaty 6 territory and the Homeland of the Métis, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

00:42 I’ve said that a few times before – that “I grew up in a Walmart” – when talking to friends or to colleagues, in casual and professional situations. I opened with it, once, at a conference where I was delivering a paper on chain stores. But I’ve been working on a project about places like Walmart – big-box and department stores and other sites of retail, like supermarkets and malls – so I’ve recently been trying to figure out what it means when I say it, and how my experiences of and in Walmart shape up to those of other folks. I’ve been wondering about the embodied Walmart experience, and about all the many differences in the physical and emotional sensations of anyone who enters a Walmart: the shoppers, the employees, the mall-walkers, artists, filmmakers, photographers, the boycotters, first-time visitors, long-time lovers of the store.

01:45 I’ve been watching movies that feature Walmart, reading news stories, poems, novels, tweets. Listening to podcasts, looking at Walmart art. Going to the store, taking pictures, audio-recording my thoughts as they happen. I have a lot of feelings about Walmart, feelings that are wrapped up in my particular body and my own history and experiences, my memories growing up there. But I wanted to know about other feelings, other experiences, other bodies that walk the aisles I do. This essay gives a brief look into this larger and ongoing work through my own lifetime relationship with Walmart – a relationship that started with someone quite close to home: my mom.

*

02:34 *laughter, me and my mom*

Mom: Why would you show me that?

*more laughter*

Me: Because it would be unethical if I didn’t show you…

*

02:39 When I was little, my mom got her dream job working as a cashier at Walmart. From that point on, Walmart became the landscape, the playground, the social hub of my youth. Walmart was where my dad, my sister, and I, or some combination of my family or family-friends, would pick up and drop off my mom, while away the hour or two after school, before shift end. Sometimes we’d go there with the specific purpose of sighting her, to try to spot what has been called her Heather Locklear-hair, bobbing along as it still does above the tills and the merchandise. These days I have a better vantage point for spotting her, now that I can see over the racks of clothes.

03:26 Walmart was where we shopped for bikes and brought our birthday cash for toys and found Christmas presents and went to staff parties with the other Walmart kids. Every year in the lead-up to September, my sister and I got our school clothes on the employee discount, and I’d get excited to put big-ticket items on layaway, which seemed to me, at the time, like a magical transaction where we could buy things without actually paying the pricetag.

03:54 Walmart is where my dad chased me, a mortified child, up and down Sporting Goods with his shirt pulled halfway over his head, belly exposed and yelling out my full damn name, as I screeched and ran away – but also, reluctantly, laughed my ass off. In the McDonalds stationed in our Westside Walmart, family lore has it that my dad once ate four Big Macs in a single sitting. My friend’s little sister was shocked and in awe – proud just because of her proximity to such a feat.

04:36 That’s the same McDonalds where I would later, as a teenager, meet friends for fountain pops and the Happy Meals that we ordered, I think, through some half-baked concept of irony; or where I’d spend solo McNugget lunch hours, when I started working at the Dollar Store in the same mall, right next to my mom’s Walmart.

04:58 Across the square footage of those couple stores, the Confederation Mall Walmart and the Dollar Store Plus beside it, by happenstance that feels something more like design, I found and formed some of the strongest, dearest, most fundamental, ongoing relationships of my life. Just a store’s boundary away from my mom, I saw my first real glimpse of a work ethic focused on community-building, on relationships. And through that witnessing, I started to find my own voice, to discover a perspective: that these places around me, informing me, shaping me, were endlessly complex. The mall, the stores. These were brightly animated communities. Rich, social sites of dialogue and good relations, of ethics and struggle against injustice, of creativity and art, of emotion and intimacy.

06:01 That’s what I mean when I say I grew up in a Walmart.

Music: “Ebb and Flow” by Dyalla

***

06:16 Walmart was founded by Oklahoma-born Sam Walton in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962 – one year before my mom was born. By 1967, the Walton family owned 24 stores. In 1970, the company went public, and by 1980, it was getting $1 billion, yes $1 billion, in annual sales. 1991 marked the year that Walmart began to open stores outside the U.S., and in 1994, Walmart came to Canada when it bought out 122 Woolco stores, including the Woolco in Confed Mall that would be replaced by the Walmart my mom started at just a few years later (“Our History”).

07:05 Today, there are about 10,500 Walmarts across 24 countries, and more than 2.3 million people work at Walmart (“Our Business”). In Canada at this time of recording, there are around 400 Walmart stores, and the company estimates that more than 2.4 million Canadians shop daily in store at Walmart or online at Walmart.ca (“Our Business – Walmart”). In 2020, as the reigning largest retailer in the United States, Walmart’s overall revenue was $559 billion. This is a massive company we’re talking about here, and my approach to it in my work often feels so personal, so local, that these numbers register as impossibly huge compared to the small communities built in and by the Saskatoon stores.

*

08:01 [me and my mom, laughter]

Me: “It’s just a recording! You’re not live or anything!”

My mom: “No!”

Me: “What? I just wanna know! What are your thoughts on…”

*

08:09 I’ve been thinking, reading, and writing about places like Walmart for a few years now, and I’ve talked to my mom about Walmart a lot, along the way.

*

08:18 [me and my mom, laughter]

Me: “What?”

Mom: “You’re such a douche!”

[more laughter]

Me: “Because it would be unethical if I didn’t show you that I’m recording.”

Mom: “Why?”

*

08:23 I made a joke earlier this year that she’s my Walmart consultant, and I repay her expertise with patio food and beverages, or “mom dates” on me.

*

08:33 Mom: “It’s your mom!” [laughter]

Me: “I don’t know! You don’t have to cover your mouth. You’re acting like people can see you!”

*

08:38 When we sat down to record one of these “consulting” chats, our conversation was unfocused and wide-ranging in the way that all of our conversations are. But we came ‘round to talking about what drew her to get a job at Walmart, and why she liked it so much in those early years.

*

08:57 Me: “Because I do recall when you first got hired there, when you first even applied there, it was like this – Walmart, it probably meant something different to you obviously, but Walmart was almost like a, ‘Oh my god, I’m so’ – like you were excited to work at Walmart.”

Mom: “Yes! It was a different experience back then. It was way different.”

Me: “What initially – what made it different? Or what drew you to it?”

Mom: “Well, I loved Walmart then. Because I did find things that I liked. I didn’t work there, so that probably helped at the beginning. It was the peop—it was just…”

Me: “The people?”

Mom: “Yeah! It was like the old stores used to be . . . where you kind of felt like you knew some of your customers, like you just had time.”

*

09:34 This focus on how the people make the place, how the relationships turn the store into a community, this has been a running theme in my chats with my mom about Walmart, and in my own experiences working in retail. For us, these stores have been where we’ve found and forged connections with our people. Lifelong relationships, developed with care under the fluorescent lighting and amid the plasticked goods.

*

10:03 Me: “That’s why I’m curious . . . but also about whether you feel like you’ve built a real community through Walmart.”

Mom: “Yes, with the people who’ve been there for a long time. Yeah! We have a . . . There are people, there are relationships, there are like, you know we’re all…”

Me: “It’s a family – did you say that?”

Mom: “We’re a family!”

*

10:20 Growing up in Walmart, for me, also meant feeling like I was part of some giant family. I still see people I remember from my childhood at mom’s store, kind of like distant cousins who I don’t know super well but feel affectionately and forever connected to. And I immediately turn into “Kathy’s daughter” when I walk in the front doors of her Walmart, when my mom’s friends and coworkers notice me, or when she introduces me to new people. I love that relational title, how even walking solo in that store, I’m not really by myself, but I’m held up by a larger history, my mom’s history.

11:04 It’s also been like a family in the more literal sense: I’ve had multiple family members, close friends, and loved ones who’ve worked at my mom’s Walmart. When my cousin moved to Saskatoon and lived with us for the summer one year, it was only natural that my mom got him a job at her Walmart; another dear friend of mine worked side-by-side with my mom for some years at the courtesy desk, where shoppers take merchandise returns. My brother-in-law, my step-dad, my high school best friend, another family friend and long-time roommate. For so many years, my mom’s Walmart was the place that didn’t just feel like family or like a community – it literally was where I could find the people I loved.

*

11:49 [background music/sounds from my mom’s Walmart]

Me: “I’m just looking at the baby clothes and remembering shopping with my dad for my nieces and him just going wild every time we go shopping here and buy the girls a whole bunch of stuff. Oh my god.”

*

12:09 [background music/sounds from my mom’s Walmart]

Me: “So I’m now in my mom’s section and it’s looking good. [laughter] Good job, mom! I almost wanna try to like leave her a secret sign to let her know that I’ve been here. But of course I’ll just tell her that I came. But it’s night and she’s not working tonight, so. Yeah, I’m seeing – oh! Okay, so…”

*

12:31 I say all of this, though, with some hesitation, knowing too well, of course, about the near-countless ways that Walmart has facilitated the violent exploitation of the environment and of people, including people I love, but more broadly, entire communities, cities, countries of people. And I’m well aware of how the company relies on the ideological hook of the family to do so. In labour journalist Sarah Jaffe’s important, compelling, extremely well-researched book, called Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, Jaffe has an entire section devoted to analyzing the ways that Walmart used the model of “the family” to advance its business to global proportions and enormous wealth. “The family,” writes Jaffe, “is itself a style of work, and [Sam] Walton understood how to capitalize on it. In order to appeal to the rural housewife as a customer, as well as to appropriate her labour as she moved into the waged workforce for the first time, Walmart had to feel like the family.”

13:59 Walmart, Jaffe shows in her chapter on retail, has long benefitted from its curation of a “folksy identity” with “Christian family values” where “feminine-gendered labour patterns” are put to use, such that emotional labour, or “service with a smile” as Jaffe and others describe it, became a deliberate feature of Walmart employment and shopping experiences. Even in the structure of the company itself, Jaffe writes, “Walmart’s familial hierarchy restored order, with women doing the selling for the smiling male founder at the top.”

14:41 So when I say things like Walmart feels like a family, or when my mom calls it a family, I’m simultaneously thinking about the business contexts that make these statements particularly loaded. If Walmart is a family, by design or by feeling or otherwise, it’s well worth asking who its welcomed members are. For whom does a trip to Walmart have these emotional, familial connotations? For whom is Walmart a banal, unremarkable, everyday shopping experience? Who is permitted to “grow up” in a Walmart like a child born of the store, running around unhinged in the aisles, without supervision? Meanwhile: who is surveilled along the way? 

*

15:35 [background sounds and music from my mom’s Walmart]

Music: “Ebb and Flow” by Dyalla

II. Into Adulthood and Academia: Where’s Walmart?

16:06 In 2009, I left Confederation Mall to work at a different mall in Saskatoon, and soon after that, I began down the strange and troubled path of academia. I noticed that Walmart started to disappear from certain parts of my life. It wasn’t that I stopped going there. It’s more that the new circles forming around me seemed to operate as if Walmart did not exist. Walmart didn’t come up in conversation with colleagues or school friends. It didn’t seem like this new world I was entering into even knew about Walmart, this world of theory and research and Foucault and of everyone having opinions about books I hadn’t read and films I still haven’t seen.

16:56 Or, when Walmart did occasionally surface in talks with fellow academics, I noticed it was in this new, almost sneering, derisive way – it was nothing like the shame-free warmth that characterized my own childhood experiences of the store (my embarrassment about dad’s exposed belly aside). Suddenly, everyone I talked to – my colleagues and classmates, faculty members – it turned out they were longtime or lifetime boycotters of Walmart. The Walmart reusable tote bag I carried around took on new weight when a fellow grad student chastised me for having it, for using it, for shopping there. When I was at a bar, some rude dude teased my outfit, I guess, by yelling across the way, “Did you get that shirt at Walmart?” And yeah, I had gotten it at Walmart. I did. Cue the stress hives. My shy shrimp of a body started to calibrate itself, through these troubled interactions and despite my much better sense, to feel the necessary and socially “appropriate” level of shame for being a person, having been a person, who shops at Walmart.

*

[background sounds and music from my mom’s Walmart]

18:22 Me: “I thought I might feel awkward kind of recording this on-the-fly as I walk around, but actually – I don’t know how good the sound’s gonna be, but my mask sort of hides my mouth moving in some ways. So I feel good! I feel discreet. I feel not too creepy or weird, like I did recently when I came here on a similar research mission. Maybe it’s like the stream-of-consciousness just mimics the way that I used to have a kind of stream-of-consciousness thinking going when I would walk around the store as a kid. Maybe this is more suited to my usual way of experiencing Walmart, like sort of on-the-fly thinking and looking and hearing and sensing, and all those things that I did as a kid. Like, using my body to read the store and to experience the store, instead of like ‘thinking’ my way through the store, which just felt icky, feels icky, still, a little bit.”

*

19:24 In Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart by Adam Reich and Peter Bearman, professors at Columbia University, the authors write that “most of [their colleages] tell [them] that they have never been to a Walmart, or just went once, in an emergency, on a road trip or something.” “It is our intuition,” the authors write, “that many people in [the authors’] networks conflate their disdain for Walmart as an abusive employer with a class-tinged disgust at the company’s low class. They don’t shop at Walmart because it is cheap and dirty and tacky and sterile,” and not just because “it treats its workers badly” (45). Reich and Bearman call this a “thin form of solidarity” which becomes “an intellectually justifiable excuse for revulsion” (45). My personal experiences hearing (and not hearing) about Walmart in academia are not far off from theirs: the tote bag, the shirt, the derision, or in other cases, the surprising absence of this space so globally ubiquitous and, to me, so crucial to my youth.

20:45 It’s one thing to be deeply critical of, and provoked into action by, the ways that Walmart is responsible for enormous injustice: the company has, of course, been widely, vehemently, and rightly condemned for its violations of human rights and labour conditions, its notoriously low wages, and more destructive corporate behaviour than I can even name, from the factories that produce its merchandise, to the retail locations and consumer interactions that complete the Walmart supply chain. In 2020, multiple Walmarts across Canada, including in Thompson, Manitoba (“Racial Profiling”), and Vancouver, British Columbia (Woodward), were the subject of news stories involving the racist, sometimes physically violent profiling of Indigenous shoppers. Unjust surveillance, security, and policing measures have also meant that Walmart stores and parking lots have become repeated sites for encounters of fatal policing and police violence toward Black shoppers.

21:51 In fact, Walmart has been the perpetrator of so many social harms of such magnitude that the CEO, C. Douglas McMillon, was prominently included in The Captured Project: an art project by “people in prison drawing people who should be.” McMillon was drawn by Charles Lytle, an incarcerated person who was serving nine years for robbery and assault, while McMillon’s list of company crimes include, according to the project: bribery, looting the public, public endangerment, stealing workers’ wages, and tax evasion (Greenspan and Tider).

22:32 But necessary and thoughtful critiques of Walmart’s failures and damages are not equal to the casual, in-passing, shockingly normalized ways that Walmart and its employees and shoppers have been the subject of ridicule and the worst expressions of better-than-thou thinking – in academia, yes, but also beyond. Jaffe’s book tells a tale of one customer, after being told they’re unable to return an item, saying contemptuously to their child, “This is why you get an education. So you don’t end up like her”—the employee. Another piece published by the New York Times likewise tells of one Walmart employee, Ashley VanHorn, who “overhear[s] two little girls tell their father they wanted to work at Walmart one day.” The father’s response? “You can do better than this” (Corkery).

*

[background sounds from my mom’s Walmart]

23:28 Me: “Lest I come off as a Walmart expert – you too! – because of COVID I haven’t been here that often, in like a year and a half, and so… I’ve been here barely at all really. And I just realized, I don’t even really know the setup at their self-checkouts, and when I went to go try to hit ‘tap’ my card, I didn’t know where to tap and I kept on tapping it in the wrong spot.”

*

24:00 Making fun of people who work and shop at Walmart is nearly a North American pastime at this point. The infamous and incredibly troubling website PeopleOfWalmart.com built their brand and identity entirely off this hobby: their own site description, as of July 2021, is a straightforward model of the kind of thinking that flippantly dehumanizes people who go to Walmart. It reads: “You know that creature you spot every time you go shopping at certain chain department stores? That’s People of Walmart.  It’s like spotting the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot except, since it’s Walmart, way more common.” There are tags and language throughout the website, like “Featured Creatures” or “Walcreatures,” that really make clear the point, their point: those who shop at Walmart are creatures, not people, and like a paid freak show spectacle, we’re justified in capturing and circulating their deviance from the acceptable norm (“FAQ”).

*

25:10 Me: “…even moreso sketched out by… I don’t want to be extractive. Like, it’s a weird… I feel I’m just simply, I mean I wanted ice cream there. I go to Walmart, you know, I’ve been to Walmart a million times in my life. I’ve probably bought ice cream there several times before, if not dozens of times before – let’s be real. But just simply adopting this, like, scholarly sort of perspective, made me feel extractive. It made me feel like I was, like, grossly trying to get something out of this experience. And to be honest I don’t care about being extractive about Walmart as a company. The people who work at Walmart, who shop at Walmart, who use the services at Walmart, who are getting vaccines at Walmart, who are part of the Walmart community, I don’t want to go in there and be extractive in my relationship to those people. So I think that’s the hang-up that I’m experiencing now. So, I guess I’ve been…”

*

26:07 To be clear: as far as Walmart and academia go, there is quite the breadth of published scholarship on the company. But this scholarship comes out of fields like business, economics, and labour studies. When I use academic library search functions to find sources about Walmart, I get over 500,000 results – but when I go to filter by subject area, my only options are topics like Corporate Profiles, Investments, Dividends, Macroeconomics, and Management. Where do you go to find the work on how Walmart makes you feel? How bodies and emotions intersect with Walmart in complicated ways?

*

26:56 [background sounds from my mom’s Walmart; employee’s voice on speaker system]

Me: “That’s actually something that was always exciting, is like – ‘I heard my mom on the intercom, I heard her on the speaker system!’ Super fun. Feels like you know someone famous.”

*

27:18 Kit Dobson’s work on the cultural significance and depictions of shopping, retail, and malls in Canada has been foundational for me as an example of arts-based scholarship that directly confronts these questions, questions of feeling and affect, of bodies and embodiment, in relation to places like Walmart.

27:41 But even Dobson, a Professor of English at the University of Calgary, figures himself as a kind of outsider to the world of Walmarts. One chapter from his book Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada opens with the disclosure that he’s never been to a Walmart and he’s “always boycotted it” (110). Dobson suspects from his research that Walmart, as he writes, “is the sort of place that [he] should be bound to dislike” (110). When he gets there, to the Walmart in Whitehorse, he tells the story of eating at a McDonalds for the first time since the ‘90s, and he calls the fries “tasty, in a chemical-laced sort of way” (117). Reading that for the first time a couple years ago, I felt the same flush of heat that I did when my fellow bar-goer called out my Walmart shirt, ‘cause I grew up on McDonalds, and I find the fries tasty in a… tasty kind of way.

28:47 But in the spirit of the ethically-minded, justice-oriented work that Dobson is known to do, in that very same chapter, he models a kind of self-aware reflection on his own identity in relation to his experience of Walmart, and to being a lifetime Walmart boycotter. “Everyone I spoke with in preparation for this trip,” he writes, “had a scathing analysis of Walmart. In writing this chapter, it was tempting for me to fall into the same analysis too . . . Yet I felt my continuity and complicity with the society that brings Walmart into being.” He writes, “I am . . . at Walmart as a class tourist. I can’t let myself be haughty or superior, because that would simply be a way to reproduce and extend my own privileges” (125).

29:42 “When I look around the store,” he continues, “I see a far greater diversity of people than I do in the corridors of the university in which I work. Many class backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, abilities, ages, sexualities and genders are visible in Walmart. . . . The shoppers are able to keep themselves and their families fed and clothed until the next paycheque. I am free to walk back into the sunshine and shop at organic markets and fair trade clothing stores to my heart’s content. All of which makes me wonder whose interests my boycott has really served” (125).

*

30:25 [background sounds from my mom’s Walmart]

Me: “The yarn section was like my favourite when I was little. My mom crocheted all growing up, and so I loved looking at the different yarns, and remember her using and having a variety of these different colours to make Barbie clothes for my Barbies. She would make really beautiful, crocheted, hand-crafted Barbie clothes, like even tiny little hats and stuff.”

*

30:57 I think about Dobson’s words, and wonder about how the material boycotts of individual faculty members, of individual university members, add up to the sum of some larger, more telling cultural boycott, Walmart made invisible in some academic circles through the personal decisions of people who do not want to go there, shop there, and do not even really want to talk about it. And then I think, to echo Dobson’s language, whose interests does not talking about Walmart serve?

31:35 Not talking about Walmart, it seems to me, is a way of not talking about class. It’s a way of not talking about how class intersects with race, disability, gender, sexuality, and other vital aspects of identity and community – particularly for a company with a notably diverse workforce and customer base. In 2020, 46.5% of Walmart associates were People of Colour (“Advancing Our Work on Racial Equity”). The protagonist of Oji-Cree/nehiyaw writer Joshua Whitehead’s novel Jonny Appleseed calls going to Walmart “every urban NDN’s favourite pastime” (142). Otoe-Missouria and Choctaw journalist and advocate Johnnie Jae named Walmart “something that ISN’T Native but FEELS Native to you,” and described it as the “unofficial and intertribal meeting ground” and the “new hunting grounds” (@johnniejae). Not talking about Walmart seems to me an outcome, a tacit and telling reproduction, of academia’s persistent whiteness. Not talking about Walmart is a function of academia’s stubborn elitism, its circulation of particular norms around taste. Not talking about Walmart is academia’s lingering discomfort with the everyday, the working-class, the poor.

*

33:10 [background sounds from my mom’s Walmart; beeps and sounds from me going through the tills]

Music: “Ebb and Flow” by Dyalla

III. Present Day: Look, Mom! I’m a Walmart Researcher

33:43 It’s summer 2021, and I’m now over a decade into the world of academia, as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University. I’m also still deep in that same world I grew up in, with the malls and Walmarts and dollar stores and Big Macs — actually, it’s a plain cheeseburger and fries for me, sometimes the odd nug. My research involves studying so-called “non-places,” a term anthropologist Marc Augé coined to describe places in which we become travellers or consumers, like airports and supermarkets and hotels. And so these days I’ve been trying to negotiate the Big Feelings I have about Walmart, this personal history and the memories, at the same time that I’m also reading the books, the theory, the published scholarship. Doing the technical work, the article-finding, page-flipping, writing.

*

[background noises at my mom’s place]

34:45 Mom: “What does this have to do with non-places?”

Me: “Walmart is a non-place.”

Mom: “Okay, so why? And what does this have to do with it?”

Me: “Well, some people would suggest Walmart’s a non-place. Because it’s a place that’s not really a place because it doesn’t have like a cultural history, or it’s not seen as having a real deep community or local roots. But I think that that’s problematic, don’t you think?”

Mom: “But Walmart thinks it does have a deep community and cultural roots.”

Me: “Mmhmm.”

Mom: “It thinks it does.”

Me: “Yes.”

Mom: “Right?”

*

35:17 In an earlier draft of this very essay, I wrote a couple of questions that get at the complexities I feel in being someone who grew up in Walmart and, now, who researches Walmart from a Scholarly Perspective, capital-S, capital-P. I wrote:

Why does going to Walmart feel a bit to me like coming home? What are the implications of feeling such affection for and inside this massive, and massively harmful, global corporation – this beast that has had such horrifying effects on humans and more-than-humans, on social and environmental justice?

36:03 But the thing is, I notice my own relationship to Walmart changing through time and through this research. Going to Walmart is like returning home, yes, but it’s also like returning to a home I left long ago and that feels different now, or at least I feel different inside it. I’m not the roam-free child anymore, that’s for sure, and now when I walk into Walmart, I bring a lot more baggage: the social anxiety, the ethical concerns that animate my every decision, the killjoy spirit, to invoke the vital figure profiled by Sarah Ahmed (see, for more information, Mehra).

36:48 When I went to Walmart recently – to do research, but also to get ice cream – it was a strange experience going there with an academic goal of sorts.

*

36:59 Me: “But I still felt really weird the entire time. And . . . I’ve spent many, many hours of my life in different Walmarts across the city, as well as in other cities, and yet I was coming in feeling so awkward and so, well, noticed immediately. And so almost wrong. I felt, like, ethically weird about sort of adopting a different perspective, like a scholarly perspective, as I’m walking in, which is something I’ll have to think about and unpack and wonder about as I go along, I think. Um, but . . .”

*

37:31 One of the last few times I visited Walmart was for the first dose of my COVID-19 vaccine. By pure luck, I swear, I happened to get an appointment in my mom’s Walmart. Not the old one of course, from the mall, the one that closed, but the newer location, the Supercentre my mom’s worked at since it opened in 2010, further toward the outskirts of the city of Saskatoon. My mom was working that day and, unsurprisingly, soon after her shift, she rushed over from the front of store to wait with me before my shot, vaccination present of nail polishes and face masks in her hand.

*

[background noises from the pharmacy and pharmacist at my mom’s Walmart]

38:11 Mom: “Ooooh, it’s coming! It’s coming!”

*

38:16 She asked the pharmacist if she could come in with me for the shot – because, yes, I’m a child – and she decided to take a video.

*

[background noises from the pharmacy and pharmacist at my mom’s Walmart]

38:23 Mom: “Here we go Jess! . . . Yay! Yay!”

*

38:26 The pharmacist explained that I would need to stay in the lobby area after the shot to wait out the fifteen minutes in which there’s the greatest risk of allergic reaction, and they described the possible side effects. Then came the POKE.

*

[background noises from the pharmacy and pharmacist at my mom’s Walmart]

38:41 Mom: “Woohoo!”

Me: “I just don’t like looking.”

Mom: “Oh, It’s so fast and easy.”

Me: “I know. I’m not even a non-needle person.”

Mom: “Woohoo! Woohoo! I want a Woohoo!”

Me: “Woohoo!”

Mom: “There we go! Yaaaay, Jess is getting a COVID poke!”

*

38:51 I had made such a big deal about wanting the sticker that some vaccination sites were giving out that the Walmart pharmacist gave me their personal sticker from their own vaccination, since they didn’t have others to spare. It was the tiniest gesture of care, but combined with the emotional heft of finally getting vaxxed, of being in my mom’s Walmart *with her* after more than a year of not seeing each other much, after six months of not seeing each other at all, I nearly burst into tears.

*

[background noises from my mom’s yard]

39:25 Me: “You were there. It was in your Walmart. What do you think about the fact that vaccines are happening in Walmart?”

Mom: “I love it.”

Me: “How come?”

Mom: “Well because It makes me feel safer because our staff is getting vaccinated.”

*

39:38 Walmart’s spatial, social, cultural, and corporate dimensions have changed significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The movement of bodies in and around retail space has been altered dramatically by physical distancing measures. By masks and plexiglass that differently produce sensory experiences and human-to-human interaction. By the tensions and anxieties of simply walking through collective space that, due to the transmissibility of the disease, can be a threat to your health, to your body, to your life.

40:19 And Walmart has become charged with new significance through its role in COVID-19 vaccination efforts: it is now also the facilitator of these life-sustaining encounters in the context of a global pandemic. A place for medical moments of worldwide import: emotional, scary, cathartic, vital. For me, too, getting vaccinated at Walmart has meant it’s overlaid with more meaning: as a site newly charged with a small beat of hope, a breath, a sigh, a relief.

Music: “Ebb and Flow” by Dyalla

*

41:26 On many occasions, writing notes toward this essay, I’ve gotten emotional. It has been an affecting process for me to return to my own relationship to Walmart, my mom’s, my family’s. Even as I was typing this out, this disclosure, I feel the lump start to form in my throat. On July 7th, I posted a status update that read, in part, that “I have become so emotionally involved in this Walmart audio essay that every time I even open up the Word doc to add to it, I get teary.”

I said, writing about Walmart “means writing about my family, my childhood, my youth, some of the dearest memories I have.”

“Writing about Walmart, it turns out, means writing about my mom.”

*

[background noises from my mom’s yard]

42:29 Mom: “One hundred percent!”

Me: “Alright. Well, thank you for your time!” [laughter]

Mom: “You’re welcome! And you can use any words. Is that what you’re supposed to say?”

Me: “No, no I would…”

Fade out to Music: “Ebb and Flow” by Dyalla

*

Notes: Thank you to Dyalla for making the music included in this audio essay. Thank you to Paul Barrett and Sarah Roger for the invitation to complete this project as part of the Future Horizons conference, which was postponed due to COVID-19. Thank you to Myra Bloom for all the helpful feedback on drafts of this essay, and for the mentorship, cheerleading, and solidarity. Thank you to my mom for a lifetime of conversations, for speaking with passion, joy, and sometimes fury, and for listening with such care and compassion.  

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Jessica McDonald is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University and a white settler working on Treaty 6 territory and the homeland of the Métis in Saskatoon. She studies contemporary writing from Canada in relation to social and environmental justice, the politics of place, and decolonizing or anti-colonial approaches to space. Her postdoctoral project, Nowhere to Here: Non-Places in the Contemporary Canadian Literary Imagination, studies depictions of chain stores, airports, hotels, and other sites of travel and retail in literatures written or published in Canada.

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@johnniejae. “1. A tubby, sarcastic and brilliant, if I don’t say so myself, Native would be the perfect boss mainly because of reason #2 NATIVES LOVE WALMART which is basically Cloud9, you see what most non-natives don’t know is that Walmart is our unofficial and intertribal meeting ground.” Twitter, 28 Feb. 2020, 5:52pm, https://twitter.com/johnniejae/status/1233540384430575617.

—. “Quote tweet: @honey_child, What’s something that ISN’T Native but FEELS Native to you. Response: Walmart….the new hunting grounds [laughing emoji].” Twitter, 11 Nov. 2020, 4:22pm, https://twitter.com/johnniejae/status/1326651570939813888. 

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