Low alkalinity is never a cause of cloudy water. High chlorine is also never a cause. So, you've gotten some pretty useless advice from your store.

Take a look at the testkit info page: http://pool9.net/tk/ If at all possible, order a K2006.

Meanwhile see if your local Walmart has the HTH 6-way drops kit. If they do, get it. If not, get a cheap OTO/phenol red drops kit.

Post results, with whatever kit you find ASAP. I've got a page I wrote a number of years ago, listing 100 reasons for cloudy pool water, partly to make the point that it's very hard to tell WHY your pool is cloudy without more info. Complete test results are usually necessary, and test strips simply aren't accurate enough.

Meanwhile, be sure to maintain adequate to high chlorine levels: LOW chlorine will result in all sorts of cloudy water.

Also, if you haven't manually cleaned and washed your DE filter this season, now would be a good time to do so. DE filters can get choked with old DE, and that also can lead to cloudy water.

Good luck!