Last night, I wanted a paper cutter. I was really interested in the kind with the big swinging arm that you used to see in elementary school libraries until kids started cutting off the ends of their fingers, but really, just about any paper cutter would do.

So, at 7:00pm on a rainy Sunday night, I went to Target.

No paper cutters. Not even an empty spot on the shelf where paper cutters should be.

Just next door to this Target, there's a Wal-Mart.

It must be noted that I am from Arkansas, as is Wal-Mart. If you ask me about Uncle Sam, I don't know if you're talking about this guy or this guy.

Now, I have always thought of Wal-Mart as an OK kind of place. Back home, you'd go to Wal-Mart and run into your neighbors, your school principal, your pediatrician, and so on. Just a regular place to go to buy stuff like shampoo and laundry detergent, school supplies and sewing fabric. People say "excuse me" when they walk between you and what you're looking at on the shelf.

The Wal-Mart here is a different story.

• It's so loud.
• It's unbelievably cluttered. There's just stuff everywhere.
• It seems that everyone who ever appeared on COPS hangs out there.
• It takes a reeaaaallllllyyy long time to check out.
• People are buying basketfuls of nothing but groceries. (Groceries?!? At Wal-Mart?!?)
• You have to try hard not to commit vehicular manslaughter of a juvenile with your cart, because they are running around everywhere. Like packs of wild hyenas, and just about as loud.
• I thoroughly dislike it.

I don't remember any of these things being true of any Wal-Mart I've ever been to in Arkansas.

I'm not trying to be a stuck-up suburbanite professional white guy snob. I just think it's interesting that it's so different now than I remember.

I think it might be because a lot of the Wal-Marts I've been to in Arkansas are in small towns. Everyone is nicer, things are less stressful, order trumps chaos, and vapid consumerism is not yet king in small-town Arkansas. In some towns, Wal-Mart acts as the community center, and people make a trip there roughly once a day.

Also, it's been a while since I regularly went to Wal-Mart in Arkansas. Maybe things are different than I remember them in all Wal-Marts everywhere. My mom says my description of my Wal-Mart isn't so different from a description of her also-suburban Wal-Mart.

In spite of all this, I still think of Wal-Mart as a regular OK place to go, assuming you mentally prepare yourself for it first. Even though it took nearly thirty minutes and a lot of kindness and understanding for my fellow man, I walked out of there into the rainy Sunday night with a paper cutter.