Shopping Sucks
| December 19, 2011 | Posted by wpadmin under Uncategorized |
I hate shopping mostly because it sucks. This should not surprise anyone since I'm a man. When my wife says to me, "Would you like to go shopping?" I actually hear, "Would you like me to kick you in the groin repeatedly for 2 hours?" I don't even like shopping for manly stuff. The other day I went to a Home Depot, and I wandered around for 15 minutes looking for a guy in an orange apron. Once I found a guy, I asked where a particular type of fixture was located. He said that they were “somewhere in the back corner of the store.” I thought, "Thanks for that! Sorry I interrupted your day." After traversing a couple of zip codes, I found another guy in an orange apron who told me to stand in the aisle while he paged someone to come and help me. I thought, "Hmmm, I don't like this plan. I think he’s going to leave me here, go on his lunch break, and laugh his ass off while I stand here for hours next to all these fire extinguishers." So I asked again, "Can you just help me?" but he said, "Oh, that's not really my specialty.” I thought to myself, "Oh, so this is like medicine. You can't expect an Internal Medicine guy to do Brain Surgery. I get it. Oh no, wait a minute, I'm looking for a bathroom fixture! This is not brain surgery, orange aproned-guy!"
Today, we went to a couple of craft stores. To me, this is the worst of all shopping experiences. My "boring shield" goes up before I even get in the car. Craft stores are like black holes of all things interesting -- meaning, if there was something interesting within two miles of a craft store, the store would suck it in, and make it somehow not interesting. Not only that, but craft store employees somehow manage to be both smug and unhelpful. We walked up to a guy and asked him if he worked there. He turned to us and looked down at us mockingly as if to say, "No, I wear this ugly shirt, headset, and name tag because I don't work here." Spotting the obvious, we continued, "Do you have any squeakers to put inside dog toys? (our dogs destroy them by the dozen)" Looking quite pleased with himself, he said, "No, we sure don't." Um, a simple 'no' would have been fine, smug craft store-guy. When we finally got our other craft-related purchases, we got in the shortest line behind a lady who was in the middle of a 30-minute diatribe about how the cashier was simply not giving her all her coupon credits. Finally, the lady abandoned the whole order saying, "This just isn't going to work for me." I was tempted several times to offer to pay the amount under dispute but my wife explained to me that this would have been rude. I still think it would have been the best thing for all parties involved, quite frankly. Another thing--when we put our purchases on the counter, the guy rang it up and cheerfully said, "That'll be $16.25 today." This made me want to say, "Today? Why do people say that? Were you under the impression that I might want to buy these tomorrow? The coupon lady kept us here so long that it's practically tomorrow anyway. Here, here's my credit card...today."
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the other thing i hate about craft stores is the hordes of miscellaneous crap completely unrelated to anything within the realm of arts, crafts, and design. oh hey, lets sell really ugly china that doesn’t appeal to any generation still in existence. or crap with kittens all over them. and let’s reserve half our store to fake plants! but we might not have the size paintbrush you’re looking for. awesome. and i only recently discovered that hobby lobby is pretty much a christian organization, which explains all the crosses and jesus goodies everywhere. in other news, happy new year!
Isfahan, thanks for your comments! I enjoyed them and thought they were hilarious! It’s good to meet someone else who hates craft stores!