If I’m going to be a member of the underclass, it’s time to act like a member of the underclass. So I started three days ago.

I went to Wal-Mart for my weekly shopping.

By any conventional definition, I’m now on the lower rung of the socio-economic ladder. I have no job. I have no employer-provided health insurance. I’m putting nothing away for retirement. In fact, I’m not even making enough money these days to pay taxes. I haven’t given Uncle Sam a dime since April. Yeah, life is good in that special way it becomes when you’ve stripped it down to the fundamentals. Shelter. Food. Love. Everything else is a needless expense.

This circumstance is by choice, of course. I put myself in this position with planning and forethought.  But that doesn’t change the reality of my current day-to-day life.   My outgo exceeds my income, at least until some projects fall into place. That’s why it seemed like the right time to become a regular Wal-Mart customer.

Pay attention to that waffle word: “regular.” Fact is, I’ve shopped at my neighborhood Wal-Mart on an ad hoc basis for several years. (Note to self:  Now that I’m a Wal-Marter, dial back on the highfalutin Latin phrases.) But until this past Friday, I had never made the usual list of my weekly grocery/health/miscellaneous needs and filled it during a single visit to one store — especially not the one store that sits at the left hand of Lucifer, as the more progressive souls among us believe.

I was amazed at how easily and quickly I got in touch with my inner poverty-level shopper. Within minutes, I passed up the premium frozen pizza for the downmarket generic brand. I bought the cantalope for a buck even though I wanted the honeydew, which was on the north side of three bucks. And for the first time in years, I completely passed up bottled water, which has come to be my one true addiction in life. Instead, I found a glass carafe with a stopper for two dollars and change — cheaper than the cheapest six-pack of bottled water — and filled it from my kitchen tap to cool in the fridge. (This also helps ease my environmental conscience, which was unsettled by a recent article about the bottled water industry by my pal Charles Fishman. Charles pointed out that Americans went through about 50 billion plastic bottles last year — of which three-quarters ended up in landfills.)

The dog is sharing this new austerity with me. I bought him cheap dog food and Wal-Mart’s own branded dog biscuits. But I can’t imagine this change will matter much to Fido. After all, he eats any decayed bit of organic matter he finds on the ground.

Of course, that could be me in a few more months.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 1:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.