Yesterday the light over our sink was out. I noticed that it had a 14-inch bulb and a small fuse-shaped starter part. Not knowing which one was shot I decided to replace them both. So off to Menards to find the replacement parts and get the fix done.

Everything at Menards was fine, to find the products, the location of the bulbs was pretty much where I expected them and the starters come in a two-pack for two dollars, and I just needed one, so now I have a spare. Oh hooray. But after we found the bits we needed, we ran into a cashier, which is a terminal destination if you want to buy something from them as they have no DIY lanes.

There is this arrangement for the cashiers, and it is deeply unsettling. Each lane has a spot to pull a cart into, carved out of the tabletop leading to the cashier, there is no belt delivery to the cashier, but instead it is flipped and serves the cashier to the customer on the other side, post-cashier. Also, the cashiers are facing the same direction as the customers, so that when you approach them, their backs are to you, you pull the cart into the spot, and then you … walk behind and around the cashier to where the point of sale terminal is, at the end of the belt, and you collect your items yourself and bag them yourself. This flips the standard way that customers interact with cashiers, we aren’t apparently supposed to socialize with the cashier? You never really come eye-to-eye with them, at best it’s a kind of ignored side-eye contact if anything and that is all there is to it. Once your purchase is done, you get a defeated “thank you” afterwards from the cashier as you walk away.

Menards has good prices and a good bit of organization in their stores. If you catch them with a mislabeled price tag or a botched price on the shelves, as we have experienced before, they fix the botch and then charge you full price and lie right through their teeth that there was ever any issue with either the product, the label, or the shelf itself. Which is why, if you go to Menards and spot an issue, you snap a photo of it to catch them being clever. So you know, not much love lost already. But then there is this bit here, the checkout. All the Menards share this feature, and I can’t help but read into the design of the checkout lanes and what that means. The design is deeply depersonalizing for the cashiers, and makes being a customer deeply socially upsetting. You don’t meet their eyes, there really is no room for any sort of conversation or even communication. In a lot of ways, it turns a human cashier into a kind of mechanical turk machine. They all might as well be DIY lanes, you aren’t really engaging with the staff, so why is it this way?

The design of the checkouts at Menards leads me to think that this entire design was created by people who are somewhat agoraphobic. They just can’t handle the social interactions and so, they designed the one place where customers and staff interact for sure so that neither party has to look at each other, so there is no social stress at all. But along with that goes their humanity. Why do I care who is standing there, I won’t have anything to do with them, so having a conversation is meaningless, and as such, I won’t even remember what they look like. The only thing I can really remember about any Menards cashier is that they are bipedal. That’s it. Not skin color, not hair style, not their eyes, or how tall they were, or anything, other than they were standing there and humans never come on anything more than two legs, so, that’s it. That’s all there is.

The more I think about Menards the more I am creeped out by them. By their entire company. By their spokesman on TV, who presumably is a Menard, who has that strange way about him, like he is chewing as he talks, even when excited, like he’s got gum, or perhaps tripe stuck in his teeth and he’s talking around it in that manic too-excited-to-be-healthy way. Their cashiers who might be human, but who really cares, huh? To the sneaky and clever staff that float about the store and fix pricing errors and gaslight the customers. They offer low prices, a meaningless and incomprehensible rebate program where you get some odd percentage of your receipts back, if you leave and then come back, presumably with a box full of receipts and park yourself at customer service. I’ve never been clear on why any of that means anything to anybody, keep a paper receipt? Why? Once I am sure whatever I bought won’t explode or fail out-of-box, whats the point of keeping the receipt. Are there people who collect up Menards receipts and then have a day where they waddle up to the customer service desk and… what? Dump them? Fill out a form? I don’t really get how their rebate program is supposed to increase loyalty or boost traffic.

So anyways, there’s a Menards and it’s close to the house, and I suppose that may be the only saving grace for them. They are closer than Lowe’s and more organized than Home Depot. But that’s really all there is. They are sneaky, strange, and odd. In reflection, they are perfect for the places where they have set up shop, one could say they are a reflection of the kind of people who live in this area of the country. Sneaky, Strange, Odd.