Adam McLane

K Mart saved Christmas

kmart logoWithout sounding overly dramatic, K Mart saved our Christmas day. After the service last night I took a gander at our food situation. Let’s just say the cupboards were bare and the day had been so insane that we hadn’t had the chance to get groceries.

A quick search on Google maps determined that every grocery store in our area closed at 7:00 PM. Unphased by that reality and in search of anything that could be assembled into a Christmas dinner I started driving around.

If you’ve never had to shop on Christmas eve, plan on doing it in 2008. It’s a trip. A lot of gas stations are closed. Any type of grocery store is closed. Most pharmacies are closed. Specialty stores are closed. Pretty much everything closes on Christmas eve at 7:00 PM. (I know, I checked!) Wal*Mart. Miejer. Kroger. Vince & Joes. Sheenah’s. Everything.

So this left me with two choices. Liquor stores or KMart. Every liquor store in Michigan was open late last night… but I figured that my hopes of getting mashed potatoes, ham, and other items for a Christmas dinner were slightly better at KMart. (Serving the kids Slim Jim’s and Molson Ice for Christmas seemed a little like child abuse. I wasn’t quite that desperate… yet.) So I pulled into the KMart parking lot at 23 & Van Dyke at 8:45 PM.

The place was packed!

And it was filled with tons of people just like me. Did you know that KMart has a grocery section? They don’t have much of one… but they have one. It was getting tribal in the grocery aisle as we were all looking for the same thing, meat! As I contemplated spam and ham cold cuts for Christmas dinner… the aisle filled with people looking for “one thing” they forgot to purchase. A conversation quickly erupted of the places we saw that were open that might have sour cream, yams, or freshScrooge fruit. I settled on pot roast and mashed potatoes then walked around looking for other things. After double checking the store for a spare ham in a can and walking around to snag some last minute stocking stuffers, I headed the check out where a scantly clad checkout girl scanned everything and I headed home. (She must have thought it was Halloween. Brrr.)

I just want to add. Had a grocery store stayed open until 10 last night they would have done quite well. While I had fun trying to put together “something” for a Christmas feast… it would have been so much better at a grocery store.

I kept thinking about Charles Dickens’s Scrooge. Where did he get that goose and all those presents on Christmas morning? It must have all come from KMart– open until 10 on Christmas eve.

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Adam McLane

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4 responses to “K Mart saved Christmas”

  1. MB Avatar
    MB

    That is hilarious Adam…and so similar to our ‘last night’…

    I did (just barely) make it to Kroger to get our traditional family breakfast (cinnamon rolls in from a can – weak, I know, but it’s tradition!) and bacon…OJ and milk. Also got a few other ‘staples’ along with an itunes gift card for one nephew and a battery charger for my other nephew.

    However – we were STARVING after the Christmas Eve service and an hour from home so we stopped in the one gas station we could find and picked out ‘dinner’ – shoot we could have gone to Ruby Tuesday’s for what we paid (but they weren’t open!)

    When we got back to Etown we needed a couple more last minute Christmas things and stopped by the

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  2. MB Avatar
    MB

    (continued…accidently ‘sent’)

    Anyway…

    we stopped by the local Walgreens and it, too, was full.

    Guess Kmart was probably open here too, but it was on the other side of town.

    Hope your Christmas ‘dinner’ is delicious!

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  3. Todd Porter Avatar
    Todd Porter

    Adam, we drove by there about that time on our way to our churches Christmas Eve service. Kim noted that Big Lots was closed but KMart was not. Good thing for you.

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  4. Cathy Avatar
    Cathy

    Yep…I remember working at the grocery store. We closed at 4pm on Christmas Eve (as did every other store in town). Since there were still people checking out, some of us had to stand at the front door and turn people away. And turn away people we did. Sure, the store could have made money, but we didn’t want to be working any more than the customers would have wanted to be working! Thank God money isn’t everything!

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