Now that I have all the pieces I need for my bed after finding a new person with a box spring I set about dressing it. I went to K-mart, found a style I wanted and picked up a fitted sheet, king pillow case, and artificial down mattress topper which totaled around $90. Walking towards the register I started to slow as the gears of my mind began turning at what I was doing while a gaggle of neurons shouted “NO! STORES ARE FOR GROCERIES AND EMERGENCIES NOT HOUSEWEARS.” I checked Amazon and found my needed items for about $25 cheaper so I put the K-mart ones back. I walked to the door empty handed and felt bad at having used their retail space more as a catalog than store and tried to come up with a way to thank them but nothing came to mind. K-mart needs an e-commerce pity tip jar.
Tag: shopping
I Miss Genuardis
As a child, I was always told that Genuardis, a local grocery chain, was owned by the mob as a front and it explained much. They had ridiculous hours of 5 AM to midnight and no one was ever there before seven or after 11 and I assumed they stayed open so people could drop protection money or some other such shenanigans. Their store brand was amazing as I think it was a way to launder money by opening bags of Chips Ahoy! and repackaging them giving you three or four money trails to then follow. Over the years they went legit and were bought out by Safeway and store I knew and loved was gone forever. The private label went down to store brand quality and today I sat around for 20 minutes waiting for them to open as their store hours were now 7 to 11. This also meant I could no longer have my biweekly commune with the stock-people by food-shopping near midnight.
I normally have no strong preference for the local and was fine when B&N took out a local bookseller but I miss my old grocery store. I’m just not going to be comfortable going to a store with full knowledge that a kid that steals cigarettes will be met by the cops rather than a hirsute Italian man in a 3-piece suit.
Tests of Silence
I decided to not talk while walking through OfficeMax. I’m not sure why, but it seemed like a good idea. Store attendants received a thumbs up in response to questions but simple left-right head not wasn’t sufficient to allay an inquisitive associate’s “can I help you with anything?”. Turns out that blackjack hand motions of a hand going left-to-right worked. I was almost proud of how far I’d gone until checkout and I had no simple response to “debit or credit” when presenting my credit card. I first tried two fingers to represent the second option, then pointing at the card as the brand offers no debit option. Eventually, I dropped by head in shame, thinking I’d have to break my tiny vow of silence when the associate said “Don’t be embarrassed, everyone has to credit for small purchases every once in a while.”
She was very confused by the silent fist-pump that followed.
Judge Dredd of OfficeMax
I didn’t go to bed Thursday evening so I could get my one Black Friday item: a 10.1″ netbook OfficeMax was selling for $179.99 which is about $130 off.  I arrived at the store at 6 AM, saw they didn’t open until 7 and went home to prepare a sprawling breakfast and returned at quarter of 7. There were about 20 housewives, retirees, and work-at-homers tooling around outside in an orderly line and with store circulars in hand. A few minutes before the doors opened a store attendant wearing dark glasses carrying a clip board walked out and recited the following:
May I have your attention please. The doors will open in four minutes and at that time you will enter the store in an orderly fashion. Some items are available in limited quantities and these have been marked with a short stack of red tags. Without shoving, take one tag to the service counter to retrieve your item. There are store attendants stationed throughout the facility as monitors. Please be civil.
The doors opened and the anticipated collapse of Western civilization did not occur but roughly 1/2 of us made a bee line to the computers so we could be told that the circular containing the netbook was faked. One woman asked “how do you fake a circular?” to which a bleary-eye’d attendant responded “It’s just a mystery”.
Reply to Notion of the Obvious
I hate when a store attendant sees your collection of purchases and makes an obvious observation. The one I get most common is during my monthly drink trek where buy 15-20 bottles of diet Mountain Dew and there’s a fair chance the clerk will say “thirsty?” coupled with a low chuckle.  Today, I purchased four bottles of drain cleaner of various stripes (I always pit the name brand against the generic) and some gala apples. The clerk said “got a clogged drained?” followed by a chuckle to herself. I slowly panned my head away from the magazine rack until I made eye contact and simply said in a low grumble “they’ll never see it coming. I don’t need a bag for the victory apples”. He jaw dropped a bit, but that could have been her normal slack-jawed repose. I think I found a new generic response.
Battery Math
I purchased a portable compressor to inflate the various funspheres at the camporee and went to return in as after spending some time charging it wasn’t yet showing a charge. The return was, tough.
Me: I’d like to return this compressor, it’s not charging.
Salesperson: They tend to take a while to charge, are you sure it charged long enough?
Me: Yes, it’s been charging for 72 hours.
Salesperson: Well, it can take almost a day. Are you sure it charged long enough?
Me: That’s three days.
Salesperson: It is possible to charge it too much, have you discharged it at all?
Me: *waits a moment* Please, just let me return it.
Salesperson: Ok.
I enjoy the impossibility of the ssalesperson’s penultimate statement. If it couldn’t be discharged because it was overcharged, how would I discharge it? Also, how could you overcharge a battery to the point where the device showed it needed to be charged? I would love to meet the vengeful engineer who designed a battery that operated like a Super Mario Bros 2 where if you went off one side you’d appear on the other. You’d just let the battery continually charge and either time it to disconnect it at the right time or play a wonderful game of roulette with your emergency compressor. Will it work? Will it charge? No one knows!
Camporee Program Quests
My shopping list of the camporee has involved some strange bedfellows like 12 hula hoops, 13 tennis balls, 2 funnels, 3 beach balls and 2 kids sized exercise balls. Some oddities:
- I went to Toys R’ Us to buy kids exercise balls thinking they’d make giant kick balls. I asked a store attending how burst resistant they were to which she replied “profoundly, I know someone who couldn’t even pop one with a mechanical pencil.”
- Me yelling asking a cluster of teens at Oxford Valley mall to make way as I walked through their cohort with 12 hula hoops wearing aviator glasses.
- The Leslie’s Pool desk attendant asking me if diving rings would do instead of a beach ball for my giant volleyball game.
Cancelling Out Thrift
I purchased a bunch of drinks today and stated I didn’t need a bag as I was trying to prevent waste. The cashier said she wished more people did that and then put 10 self-adhesive 1.5″ x 3″ “PAID” stickers on each of the 10 bottles of 20 oz Fuze I had purchased, nicely cancelling out any environmental gain. I guess I need re-useable stickers.
Food, in the fridge, WOW!
It has literally be five months since anyone has gone food shopping. We’d consumed just about everything to the point where I was marinading 4 month old venison in Italian dressing and Arby’s Horsey Sauce to serve with broccoli florets emancipated from a solid block of ice. Today that ended. And it was good. I repeatedly looked at things on the shelves and said to myself “that looks good” or “I’ll enjoy broiling that”, I’d then look at my AmEx card, and place the item in the card while giggling like a school girl. I repeated this from about produce to cereal before it wore off, it again return when I found cheese and ice cream that were buy one get one free.
I brought in the food and immediately had some yogurt, a pickle and 3 pieces of fruit. I was saddened that there were more things I wanted to consume but couldn’t due to insufficient stomach capacity when I noticed that the walls of my kitchen featured cabinetry I could use for storage, thus allowing me to consume them later! How did no one think of this previously?