Arkansas Blog

There is something deeply sarcastic about Wal-Mart offering this "free" service. So, during the time of the Wal-Mart Economic Stimulus Plan, will Wal-Mart actually pay to staff those 25 check-out lanes that are always empty? They could stimulate the economy by actually staffing the check out lanes. Or will I have to check out my own groceries once again?

Have you been to the new Wal-Mart in Maumelle? Wow! Like, there are actual cashiers. And not just one poor overworked one either. "Sir,are you ready to check out."...it was like being in a dream state. Had to pinch myself.

Won't the bank still cash a government check for free? Sure, go to Wal-Mart, stimulate the Chinese economy, or get 6-7 tanks of gas in your SUV and help out the oil companies. Once you hit those record breaking quarters, it's hard to go back!

Don't read this unless you're into other people's nostalgia.

I guess I'm officially a geezer.

When I was a kid we would pass the Kroger, the Safeway, the Weingarten, and whatever other grocery stores were between our house and Mrs. Tabor's IGA at 12th & Woodrow. Why? Credit.

I have geezerly fond memories of these shopping trips with my mother. She'd get a basket, and I'd go straight for the freezer. I could get one thing...a Creme-sicle, Fudge-sicle, Push-up, Eskimo Pie, ice cream sandwich, whatever, and enjoy it while we got groceries. I had to put the empty, usually sloppy wrapper in the basket so it could be included in our tally. I was also in charge of putting the returnable Coke bottles where they belonged.

I always visited with Robert the butcher. Mom usually went for the run-of-the-mill stuff--hamburger meat, pork chops, chicken, maybe a roast if it was close to Dad's payday. But it was the real deal. The hamburger was either JUST ground or he ground it on the spot and wrapped up in butcher paper.

I won't go all Mike Huckabee here (dirt floor, etc.) and say that Robert wrung the necks of chickens and cut them up on the spot. But he may very well have done that in the back.

At one or several points of the shopping trip I'd visit with the only other employee of the store, Hollis (stocker, sacker, toter, and sweeper-upper of spilt flour). I could always tell where he was in the small store from the "ka-chink ka-chink" sound of the price stamper thingy onto tin cans.

When we were done I'd sit on the other counter while Mrs. Tabor added everything up. Each credit customer had her own ticket book in a rack by the register (there were a bunch), and Mrs. Tabor would enter the trip's total into the balance. Magic.

I guess Dad would stop by once a month to pay the balance, but I never saw that.

But...if a customer presented a government (or most any other) check, Mrs. Tabor would cash it if that wouldn't leave her too short in the till.

Wal*Mart: always shrewd. Always.

According to the US Treasury Department in 2005 $558,900,000 worth of fraudulent checks were presented for payment and refused by the government.

If you (bank, grocery, Wal-Mart, or check cashing company) cash a fraudulant check, you don't get doodly squat. If you are a bank and have a customer with an account at your bank you have a way to get some of that money back. If it is a non-depositor that passed a stolen or altered check, what is your recourse? Call the cops? I bet they will jump right on that. Wal-Mart has few "account holders" I suspect.

The Hilcrest burgular that pawned the camera with his valid AR driver's license and had pictures of the crook with items from 20 burglaries and pictures of most accomplises, plus pictures showing the hotel they were all staying in took weeks to bet arrested. And they were arrested at the hotel shown in the pictures.

If you don't have a bank account, and many poor people do not, you pay huge fees at banks to cash checks. Walmart should be applauded for providing lower cost financial services.

A few weeks backs hubby took an insurance check (Allstate) to the bank that issued it (Bank of America) and they refused to cash it because he only had a driver's license for a PICTURE ID...never mind his SS card and other forms of ID. (Later the main branch cashed it, but he shouldn't have been put through that unnecessary effort).

A few months back I took a Lowe's $50 check (reimbursement for delivery on one of many appliances we buy from them). I'd just gotten it and was headed to Lowe's to buy much more than $50 worth of stuff. They actually refused to take their own check. Now, damn...something is screwed up and it ain't us. I meant to do the official Lowe's management complaint, but Monkeyboy's administration has pretty much drained me of 'complaints' (only so much time/will in the day ha). But one day I'll get a chance to tell Lowe's that any business that won't take back their own check in exchange for goods/services is not too desirous of my business.

Just my way of saying I remember most of those days, too, Max...even a local grocery that regularly allowed people to charge food, without a service charge. It helped the struggling locals and it helped the store.

Few local businesses will even take a check these days. Anyone who has a checking account probably has at least a debit card tied to their account and when the merchant swipes the card & it goes through he knows he's going to get his money for the merchandise, less the percentage and transaction fees charged to him by VISA or Mastercharge. So the price of goods gets bumped up a little to cover the fees. Around the first of the year the Sherwood Hot Check court changed their procedures to make it more of a hassle for merchants to prosecute hot checks, as a result now more merchants are refusing to take checks at all (they're not "legal tender" anyway). What was once a major source of revenue for Sherwood will be declining sharply in the coming months as fewer merchants accepting checks means fewer hot checks for Sherwood.

The check is good. The casher may not be. Time's have changed people. Beating someone else out of money is not a right or wrong anymore...it's just a matter of whether we get away with it or not. Can't blame monkey boy, Walmart or your local bank for that.

I remember when I was a teller at FNB in LR and got upbraided for cashing the check of a bakery worker without ID. But, he smelled like bread. I guess, looking back, he could have stolen it from a fellow employee.

Hugh,

We lived at 1300 Monroe. That was one block off 12th street and Weingartens. That was our grocery store. We were also one block from the Polar Bear Drive In on 12th. Across the street from us was the Highland Courts.

I don't remember anything about credit. We moved off when I was 5. That was the early 60's. My dad bought the house on the GI Bill after the Korean War for $10,000. The house later became a crackhouse and in the 80's the city bull dozed Highland Courts and for good measure the city put our old "cottage" out of its misery at the same time.

I had 3 younger siblings and Weingartens had a rack of gumball machines. We would stand out there while Mom was paying. If we were lucky an old lady would see us checking all the machines looking for a left behind gumball and give each of us a penny. Mom hated when we did that.

Those checkers could work those registers like they were in fast motion. One hand grabbing groceries off the belt and the other pounding away. I always assumed they were accurate but who knows?

When Weingartens moved down to 12th and Pine or Cedar the old store was bought out and became National Food Center. For their grand opening they had a drawing and my sister won a Stingray bicycle. The bike had been in the produce department on a table that held all the watermellons. When my sister won I got to climb up on the watermelons to help get the bike down. Later the store became a Green Stamp Store. With 6 kids we racked up some green stamps pretty quickly but Mon always got a toaster or a waffle iron. We wanted the blow up canoe or if we had a stack of books as big as a set of World Book encyclopedias we could have gotten a floor model console TV.

WHEN I WAS A KID..........

Momma/dad charged groceries every week without interest. Paid the tab twice a month. There were few professional paper hangers and the few that were around usually got caught. That was when the FBI managed to get something done other than listening to innocent people's phone calls and reviewing library cards.
The bank tellers knew you after you cashed one or two payroll checks. TVs were black and white and 15" was standard. Dad taught us how to oil the record changer and clean the needle. I saw my first computer in 1956 at Dierks Forest Products in Hot Springs on a school tour.

Water was clean, sex was dirty. Someone pumped your gas and cleaned your windshield to get that 19 cents per gallon.
Only hoodlums had tatoos. Playboy mag was vulgar. If you couldn't make a crow's foot with a Diamond yo-yo you were a sissy.

I lost a tooth in football practice and the gold for a new replacement cost $18. My mother was astonished at the price. It cost as much as my senior ring.

There were no Walmart, Kmarts or Coscos. J.C. Penney was the biggest store 'downtown'.JCP charging customers had a little receipt pad of their own they had to sign when they charged or paid on their account. You went upstairs to the bookkeeper to find out your balance. They never sent out a statement.

I still charge my groceries. Times haven't changed all that much.

"Few local businesses will even take a check these days"

Hell, come over here to this part of Arkansas and see what it's like. Everyone accepts checks. I don't even lock my autos. They are outside right now, unlocked, with the keys in them. I don't lock them down when parked at Wal-Mart or down town. I threaten to in the summer just to keep them from being filled with squash, tomatoes, and okra. We only lock our house at night and in the daytime if we are out of town. I don't have a lock on my tool shed doors or on my barn entrance. If I did, my neighbors might be excluded from getting a tool they might need on a project.

The Ouachita Mountains.....best kept secret in Arkansas.

Awwww Goof, where do you still charge groceries???
Memories..............
One of my uncles had 3 grocery stores in Camden. My G'parents had a home, up on a hill,
behind one of the stores. I used to watch *the help* wring the chicken necks, they would flop
around till death overtook them, then they would dunk them in boiling water and pluk the
feathers. A butcher would cut your pork chops, round roast or grind your beef for burgers.
There was a huge jar of BIG dill pickles on the meat counter, I think they were a nickle each,
I ate my share, along with candy and big red drinks and R C COLA and later Grapette, made in
Camden. My uncle had a thriving business and everyone *charged* back then AND delivered
to homes in a pick-up truck. On weekend's the pick-up was full of kinfolk headed to a lakehouse,
and,,, us kids sitting on the tailgate with feet dragging on the road, couldn't do that now.
I had another uncle, who had a dry cleaners next door, who loved to pinch my ass, but that
is another story.

Jazzy - Hestand's in the Heights. Been going there for 31 years. I think they used to have a store in Pine Bluff.

Good merchants. Still have a couple of butchers and they will be happy to do a corned beef or pastrami on rye sandwich for you. You can even go down the soft drink isle and pull a cream soda out of a six pack and just buy one. I quit buying meat and seafood at Kroger 10 or 15 years ago.

Good proprietor. We tend to discuss either Central or Catholic baseball. He's had the upper hand this year as Catholic is on the top of the heap and Central at the bottom of the heap.

A good merchant is always hard to find. Started out with "Merle the butcher" who most people today don't know and these people are every bit as good.

For Goof, who loves my memories of New Orleans and I hope shares the outrage of
what our gov did, or didn't, do for her.

click

Jazzy- priceless. I've got to figure out how to save that!

Some Friday night, I will get Max to give you my email address and I will tell you about my family in New Orleans.

No grocery store around here where I can charge stuff -- not that I know of anyway -- but there's a certain locally owned feed store where this conversation took place.
Me: I forgot feed and I can't get there before you close . . .
Owner: Oh, don't worry. We'll prop a sack up by the door.
Twenty minutes later I pulled into a deserted parking lot and hoisted my sack of feed into the truck. I went back and paid them the next day.
I decided right then that even if I had to pay a little more (not much really and sometimes it's even cheaper), they were getting my business all the time.
I haven't been able to manage it cold turkey, but I've only been to Wal-Mart twice this month. And noting that their prices are getting higher than the competition, at least for now, on the few things I still think I have to buy there, I might forego the pleasure entirely in May.
Now someone tell me how I can do the same with Exxon/Mobil.
NO! NO! NO! Not with a Wal-Mart bicycle! NO!

"still think I have to buy there, I might forego the pleasure entirely in May."

I go to support Murphy Oil.

Goof, Max has my address, if he hasn't deleted it, would love to hear from you and share
memories of New Orleans, as I knew it 28 yrs ago....been gone a long time but its never
far from my mind. I know years from 1956 to 1983 when I made the mistake of selling my
home and moving to Florida.............big mistake.
I can tell you about going thru eye of a hurricane.....BETSY 1965
goodnight

Why are people so greedy?