Sheila tugged on Kenny’s arm and dragged him back through the store. The employees all noticed he winced in pain as she did this. “I’ll have your job! I have friends that work for Wal-Mart in Bentonville. Don’t you hear my Southern accent?!”
Another customer, who had been standing in line at customer service, pulled Lynn aside. “I saw the incident,” he said. “The other woman barely brushed against the man and even said, ‘Excuse me.’ That lady started screaming at the customer in the aisle.”
Minutes later, O’Neil’s walkie-talkie squawked for a co-manager to get over to the electronics department. Sheila was standing in front of a yellow smiley face sign, her own face twisted into a terrible frown. She was yelling that her husband had been assaulted in the store. Again, she pulled on the red sweatshirt and tugged it over Kenny’s head.
“Please don’t do that,” O’Neil requested. “That’s not necessary.”
“You’re all being unprofessional,” Sheila spat. “Don’t you know your own job description?”
“There’s no need to turn this into a personal attack,” he countered.
“I’m going to sue Wal-Mart for millions of dollars! And I’m going to have you all fired!”
“Since you have mentioned suing,” O’Neil said, “we no longer have anything to say to you.” The employees all walked away, hoping this would calm things. Sheila grabbed Kenny and left the store.
A half-hour later, store co-manager Hank Linton was asked to take a call from an angry customer. The associate said the caller specifically said she didn’t want to talk to Dan or Patsy.
After punching up the line, Linton got an earful from a woman who said she had a run-in with two assistant managers and that her husband had been assaulted in the store.
“My husband is home with me and he’s crying, because he is in so much pain from the assault,” she said. The caller then asked about the security cameras positioned around the store. “Do they have audio attached to them?”
“Security is not my job title, and I really can’t answer your questions about it.”
The caller said she was looking up flights online to Bentonville, Arkansas, where Wal-Mart’s home office is located. She said she wanted to present her case directly to the company president.
“I have family that work at the home office,” she said. “I also have a family member that does polygraphs for the FBI. I’m going to call my polygraph person and my husband and I will take one. I want the store managers to take one, too.”
Linton endured much of the rant with professional courtesy. The caller threatened to sue for millions. Then she began asking about Dan O’Neil’s history at the store. The caller was sure she had a confrontation with him at another store over dog biscuits or something. Linton provided the woman with phone numbers to the district manager and to corporate offices. He ended the conversation by wishing the caller “a great night,” although by now he didn’t really mean it.
Within the hour, Linton got a page to dial the service desk extension. The associate said there was a strange woman on the phone asking about the managers and talking in what sounded like a fake Chinese accent.
The arrival of the Epping Wal-Mart Supercenter in January of 2004 had been greeted with the typical mix of feelings: great for the consumer, bad for the competitor. Forcing out the tiny shops and storefronts meant altering the character of the town. But for “The Center of the Universe,” the “Great Crossroads,” the gravitational pull of modern American commerce was too strong to escape.
Jumping off of Route 101 at the junction of Route 125, there were already the universal commercial offerings of fast-food restaurants. There was a coffee and donut shop, as ubiquitous in New England as gourmet coffee is everywhere else. Not long after Wal-Mart went in at the junction, a who’s who of franchise labels sprouted nearby. Within a half-mile, there was also a home improvement store, a deli, a family restaurant, a drug store and a second coffee and donut shop (this one on the opposite side of the road, for the apparent convenience of commuters driving the opposite way).
There were those who saw the construction of the Wal-Mart as the Beginning of the End for their town. A cataclysmic event. They tossed at night, counting their fears like sheep. But others were rocked to sleep by the convenience and the lighting, the crowds and the prices. To them, it made no difference. The character of a town is what one makes of it. It didn’t matter if the clerks and store owners knew their names, asked about their aging parents. They could walk inside with their winter jackets unzipped and go from the nail salon to the portrait place to the fast-food restaurant inside the store. They felt plugged in, not to the local community of delis and hardware stores, but to the national community of shoppers who were browsing from sea to shining sea. They could buy armfuls of stuff and go back to the country homes they took pride in.
Four months after it opened, a cashier and a worker in the tire and lube center got married in the Wal-Mart garden center, with a reception in the break room. The department store finally had become a town square. In the battle for the soul of Epping, Wal-Mart wasn’t the enemy. Like Walt Kelly said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
On the evening of Tuesday, March 14, Wal-Mart cashier Jodee Hook was working the register when a customer with blondish hair and a brown leather coat began slamming her groceries down on the belt.
“Hi,” Hook said with as much saccharine enthusiasm as she could muster. “How are you tonight?”
“Fuck this store. The fucking door lady said that I need to fucking put more clothes on.”
The comment didn’t sound like something a Wal-Mart people greeter would say. “I’m very sorry. Is there anything I can do?”
“No. There isn’t a fucking thing you can do! I hate this fucking store!”
Hook quickly scanned the grocery items, not wanting to tangle with the customer.
“My fucking family fucking owns this fucking business!” the woman continued. “So I’m going to fucking sue this fucking place! I’m a fucking multi-millionaire and a fucking lawyer!”
Thinking she could calm the customer down by changing the subject, Hook asked what kind of lawyer the woman was. Then Hook apologized when the customer told her it wasn’t any of her fucking business.
“I’m fucking calling my fucking family up and fucking talking to them about this store and getting all you guys fucking fired! You’re all fucking nosey and fucking rude!”
The cashier scanned the last of the groceries and bagged them. The customer handed Hook a fifty dollar bill, which she proceeded to mark with the counterfeit detector pen.
“You don’t need to fucking check out my fucking money. I’m a fucking multi-millionaire and a fucking lawyer!”
“I’m sorry, but I have to check every customer’s money.” The woman took her change by ripping it out of Hook’s hands, then threw her bags in the carriage.
During her break, Hook asked the door greeter if she had said anything about a customer needing to put more clothes on. The greeter said only that she told one woman it was chilly outside.
Sheila LaBarre returned to the Wal-Mart with Kenneth Countie on Friday, March 17. This time, she was pushing Countie in a store wheelchair. The couple stopped in front of cosmetics and talked to store co-manager Priscilla Burch. Sheila introduced herself, then began telling Burch how management was negligent by not scouring