I want to start out by saying that, while I am from Uniontown, I have lived in 6 other states, all…read moreas an adult, from North to South to Midwest. I have an advanced education, and worked as a college professor before returning home to Uniontown for family reasons. While I could trash all of Uniontown for being small town, actually, stores like Walmart have come in and given Uniontown large employers it lacked after the fall of the coal & steel industry, revitalizing the area. There were no "mom-and-pop" stores for them to put out of business; there was no business to speak of here. Walmart was at the vanguard of development of the Rte. 21 corridor (now moved to a newer location across New Salem Road), which is now a hub of commercial development of all kinds.
Now, for this store. It is a Walmart. As one reviewer said, take that into consideration, it has the same ups and downs as most Walmarts. However, I felt compelled to review this Walmart when I saw the other reviews which I think are unfair. I am no fan of the ownership of the chain, or the direction they took manufacturing after the passage of their patriarch. But seeing as how I am now disabled, Walmart has saved me a great deal of time, grief, and yes, money, all of which are tight right now. The staff at the pharmacy know me by name, almost down to my birthdate. I can call and tell them my name and they know the status of my prescriptions; very rarely do I have to call more than one time, but sometimes, they are unable to answer their line. That's okay for me, because I've worked retail, I know it can be hectic. They've never been discourteous to me there. I started seeing the eye doctor at the Vision Center there a few years ago, instead of the pricey independent doctor I was seeing, because there's a wider selection of frames, though there used to be more that my insurance would cover, this year, I think for the first time I will have to pay into my glasses. But that's not the fault of *this* Walmart. There are about 2 employees of the Vision Center who I feel don't do the best job they could do, and I try to avoid them; the rest are very professional, helpful, and kind. I am likely to strike up conversations with random people, much more so now that I have to shop alone, that family members have died unexpectedly. I was looking at produce one day and noticed a price discrepancy, and brought it to the attention of a young man working there. We got to chatting, and now when I see him there, we stop and talk, I know practically everything about his life, he knows a bit about mine, plus he originally offered to let me to buy my produce at the mistaken price (I didn't take him up on that offer, I had purchased that item before and knew the real price, I wasn't going to take advantage of a posting mistake). I think I've chatted up someone in almost every department, alerting them to ironies in pricing, mistaken sizing, and sales; I've never met anyone who wasn't at least professional, if not completely friendly. They've gone out of their way to try to find things for me when I wasn't even sure if I was going to buy, I just wanted to know if they had something. And, realizing that I'm a part of my community, if I'm there and a new employee can't find something for another shopper, I show them both where it is. That's just part of being in a small town.
I've had only two experiences that I can remotely say were bad: one was with a self-checkout that just kept saying everything I put in my bag was "unexpected," and the person who was supposed to be overseeing those check-outs was busy and not able to override the recording, which goes on and on and on for minutes (it only needs to tell me once, not 50 times, and not hold up my shopping for 10 minutes each item, and if it goes off like that more than twice in a row, it should have some mechanism to shut that function off, it should recognize that it's the fault of the register, not the customer). I got a bit exasperated and started begging it to shut up and get on with my checking out, and then the Walmart employee thought that was a strange conversation (I've since learned I'm not alone, other people have this problem in other stores, too). And, at Christmastime, a male employee bagged my items so poorly, putting clothing in the same bag with frozen foods, not paying attention to what he was doing, I really wanted to just ask him to leave the stuff alone and let me do it myself. I did, after I walked away, redo all my bags. I avoided him after that. And I was fine.
That's in over 11 years of going to this Walmart. My philosophy, as a shopper, and a person, is you get in return what you give most of the time. If you give people respect, you'll get it in return. Sometimes you won't, sometimes people will just be rude, but for the most part, these people who work at Walmart are working for minimum wage at a high-profile job with poor benefits in a small town. I give them a lot of credit. It could be worse.
