Snapshot

This is what I look like right now except:

1. I am indoors and it's raining.

2. I am fully clothed.

3. My hair is silver instead of platinum.

4. I am not wearing a fuck-me shoe on my good foot.

5. I am not smiling.

6. I am not dead.

Badgered, Bothered and Bewildered

Help. I am being cyberstalked by Almart-Way.

Sorry, but like Voldemort, they must not be named. Otherwise, Google's spiders will see to it that I am hounded to within an inch of my virtual life. If you're not sure who I'm talking about, I suggest you go to translate.google.com and type in Pig Latin to English.

It all started when my cousin "liked" Almart-Way. All of a sudden, their ad, with her smiling countenance and tacit endorsement, started cropping up all over Facebook like tribbles taking over the Starship Enterprise. On my home page. On my friends' pages. On Words With Friends.

I have the usual liberal misgivings about Almart-Way. They won't let their employees unionize. They discriminate against women. They're a blight on the landscape. They undercut local small businesses. Rather than buy American and charge more, they subsidize child labor and 18-hour workdays overseas.

Unlike some of my fellow lefties, I am capable of holding two contradictory thoughts in my head at the same time. I get that Almart-Way performs a service by providing folks with inexpensive goods in a slow economy, by offering rural communities one-stop shopping and cheap prescriptions and by employing folks who might be otherwise unemployable. So I am not going to go all Marie Antoinette and suggest that financially strapped families waste time and gasoline scouring thrift shops and garage sales for second hand stuff rather than patronize their local Almart-Way. Nor am I going to recommend websites that disparage the Almart-Way clientele (condescending, exploitive and just plain mean). Still, I neither like, nor "like" Almart-Way. I am not their demo, I do not live near one of their megastores, and both my fridge and my family are too small to justify buying food in bulk.

Almart-Way's biggest competitor targets me too. I won't mention them by name either, save to say that their logo looks like a Lyme Disease rash. But here's the difference (besides better merch, better taste and far better advertising). When I nuked the Tarjay ad, it disappeared and never came back. Almart-Way, however, refuses to go away. Instead, their ads keep proliferating like baby Duggers. I have clicked Hide Story. I have clicked Hide All Stories. I have checked every "why" box from uninteresting to sexually explicit. I have repeatedly explained, in the other box, that I am on a tear because they refuse to back off. And still, Almart-Way's bland yellow logo smirks at me whenever I log on to Facebook.

They found the real estate, they're paying for it and they're taking over. And to hell with the little guy, or in this case, gal. It's the Almart Way.