My Fellow Inebriates,

Unexpectedly the kids were invited out for a playdate yesterday, leaving my parents with an afternoon to themselves. This struck me as a perfect opportunity. I had random thoughts knocking around between my two brain cells that needed typing. So I set out to find my parents and put one of them to work.

But I couldn’t find them in the house. They had vanished. What the hell could they be doing?

I started getting grossed out wondering, then I realized they’d gone to Walmart to do the Easter shopping. This was a great relief, as I wouldn’t have wanted to excavate my own eyes from my head after seeing something Unspeakable. Instead I was amused to think of my parents mingling with the People of Walmart and possibly ending up on the web later, depending on what they’d had the poor judgment to wear out of the house.

I guess I had a seed of paranoia taking root already, because it suddenly occurred to one of my brain cells that I’m a total dupe for visiting the People of Walmart—that it’s just a perversely clever marketing tool developed by Walmart to funnel even more shoppers in: shoppers insufficiently satisfied with Rollback pricing but wishing for spectacle.

For the suburb-bound, Walmart is the next best thing to a safari. (Or so my second brain cell retorted to the first.) Creatures as exotic as the People of Walmart simply couldn’t be faked or staged or set up—they have to be real.

But my first brain cell was suspicious. If Walmart isn’t behind the whole thing, couldn’t Walmart, with all its financial and legal might, shut it down? Or is it actually beneficial to have its brand identified with trailer-trash fashion and aggressively visible ass crack?

I don’t have a third brain cell, so the two had to work hard for a third option: Maybe the People of Walmart is a real phenomenon, the production of which has nothing to do with Walmart, but which Walmart tolerates because there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Bingo.

I decided to get the lowdown.

People of Walmart was conceived by three guys in South Carolina who decided, just for themselves, to document the exotic apparitions we’ve all come to associate with Walmart—shoppers in low-hanging, crack-revealing sweatpants, bondage-wearing seniors, people with goats… When they invited friends to submit pictures, they had no idea how big the response would be. A deluge of photos crashed the website as it went viral.

Andrew, Luke, and Adam, who keep their last names confidential, are big fans of Walmart. They often visit the store wearing bad clothes, and they try to keep the site light-hearted (they don’t mock the disabled, for example; but if you’re riding a scooter without a shirt on you’re fair game).

Which means that not only is People of Walmart real—it’s a kind of homage.

And what does Walmart the corporate entity think about the site?

I thought about emailing them to ask. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to wreck things for Andrew, Luke, and Adam. Maybe, I thought (with both brain cells at once) Walmart Corporate has no idea about the People of Walmart. Maybe they would mess with it—OMG! I wouldn’t want to be responsible for that, so mum’s the word.

Speaking of which, how did my parents make out?

They came home bitching about the crappy deals on Easter candy, moaning that they’ll have to wait till the last minute for Walmart to start caving on the prices.

But they did get a swell pair of rainboots for Miss P.

And, on the way inside, my mum saw a woman stuffed so tightly into minuscule hot pants that three inches of orifice stuck out. (It’s true! Yes, Virginia, there are People of Walmart!) And, she added, that woman’s ass was “hairier than any of you bears.”