I love Wal-Mart's new line of "Great Value" products. There's nothing like cracking open a bag of Great Value "Tortilla Chips" and dipping them in some Great Value "Salsa." It makes me feel like I'm living in the world of Repo Man, where all products come in generic white packaging with labels that describe what's inside. BEER. FOOD. SLICED PEACHES. SHREDDED CHEESE.
Emilio Estevez Tested, Harry Dean Stanton Approved!
Along with this intoxicating lack of pretension, however, is the haunting suspicion that what you are eating is somehow ersatz--that the contents are kept deliberately vague, to disguise the fact that your TUNA FISH is actually HORSE HOOVES, or that your BAKED BEANS are, in reality, TOXIC PLANKTON.
Yet these products are inescapable, and you may be lured to them by their dangerously low prices. Why, turn down any given aisle of Wal-Mart these days and you are likely to be greeted by a sight eerily similar to this…
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…right down to the blank-faced youths toiling in sullen anonymity.
Of course, there is a reason for all of this. The economy is a turd basket. When Repo Man was made (1984—right in the middle of the real wine and roses days of Reaganomics), store shelves were lined with similar bland generics. Now they have returned, like a recurring cold sore that belies a deeper, more disturbing problem.
With them comes a hope, however: a foolish, impossible hope that I may one day drink BEER with Harry Dean Stanton in a 1973 Chevy Impala.
In these tough economic times we have to cling to our hopes.
