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In May 2006 the snopes.com inbox began receiving copies of this purported letter from a store to the spouse of an errant shopper. The name of the man (and in one case, woman) decried by the merchant changed from letter to letter, and in some versions the retailers announced they were barring the family from the premises (as opposed to merely threatening to ban them), yet the structure of the missive was consistently the same -- the letter was always addressed to the spouse of the miscreant (rather than the delinquent himself), with the offenses enumerated in a numbered list: It's not a real letter. It's an updating of an older piece of Internet humor that goes back to at least 1997, variously titled Things to do in WalMart while you shop, How to handle stress, and While waiting for your wife at Wal-Mart: In May 2006, someone thought to update that earlier humor piece by changing it from a recommendation of future acts (things a bored person could do when forced to tag along on someone else's shopping expedition) to a recounting of past events (things someone actually had done) through expanding it into a letter. That reformatting also worked to transform a list of suggestions that a person with a loopy sense of humor might think to act upon into a comment on the effects of retirement. Some of the titles the later version has been christened with include The Perils of Retirement and Retired Husbands, names that position the item as an observation of the joys visited upon the spouse of a newly-retired husband — a man whose previous outlet for his vip and vim (i.e., his job) is no longer there for him, leaving him bored and perpetually underfoot. Husbands newly departed from the workforce are popularly perceived as handling the initial transition period in a manner akin to schoolchildren let out for summer vacation,with much rowdiness, many beginnings of new projects (quickly abandoned in half-finished states), and the failure to understand that their wives continue to have other demands upon their time and can't drop everything to tend to them whenever they start to feel restless or lonely. As the rueful comment attributed to many wives who have endured this phase of their husbands' lives expresses it: I married him for better or for worse, but not for lunch. Wives are featured prominently here in that the retailer's letter threatening to ban the family is addressed not to the merrymaker himself, but to the person presumed to be responsible for his behavior: namely, the woman he married. (Although we did happen upon one variation where the letter was addressed to the husband of a female prankster, it was practically lost in the sea of letter to the wife versions and so should be viewed as an outlier.) By addressing the letter to the wife, the writer underscores the message that the husband is acting like an out-of-control child and also introduces a new message, that the wife is failing in her duty by not imposing order upon her spouse. Western society still commonly views the woman in a marriage as the civilizing force in that social unit and so regards shortfalls in a husband's behavior as a failure on the wife's part. Finally, there is the nature of the mercantile establishment named in the piece: it is invariably one of the lower-end retailers. This imparts to the story the presumed indignity of the family's being banned from one of the least prestigious chain stores (leaving readers wondering which shops would therefore allow them through their doors). Yet there is another element to the pairing of discount stores with this tale: the presumption that standards for deportment are lower in venues where prices are lower; that it is somehow permissible (or at least more excusable) to treat these establishments and their employees badly. Variations:
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