Why I'm No Help To The Economy
This is why I don't shop.
I set out with a simple plan: Buy 2 lamps and 2 plants. The Home Depot a mile down FIgueroa seemed like a good bet, the one directly under the 110-5 Interstate Interchange and just over the hill from Dodgers Stadium. The trip's fairly short and there's no construction on Figueroa. Plus on the way in and out of the parking lot I get to check out a lot of hot (literally) unemployed men.
(They always wave and smile at me on the way out, hoping I'll need them to come home with me and help me with my day project. Unfortunately, the type of day project I have in mind does not match the one they're prepared to do. But it is an opportunity for me to have eye contact with hot men, an increasingly rare experience in life.)
I always find the Home Depot experience daunting. Anything that has 34 aisles, including an A and a B section to each aisle, plus an entirely separate outdoor section, can be overwhelming even for someone with `shopping patience' or even someone who actually enjoys shopping. I sometimes find an empty 7-11 overwhelming, so I'll admit that the second I stepped in the store a low-grade anxiety began to hum in me.
But there were people to ask, and one of them was cute, covered in tattoos, and even volunteered to walk me to the lamp section, and I had seen where the plants were on the way in; so I wasn't so anxious.
Until I started trying to pick out a lamp. The last thing I want to do is buy a lamp that requires a special bulb. One of those elongated flame-shaped bulbs, for instance. All this will do is require me to do more shopping. If I can't pick it up in the place where I do my food shopping, forget it.
So that eliminated every table lamp in my admittedly low price range.
I also don't want the lamp "shades" to be those milky plastic cones that look one step above the artistic quality one finds in a pet cone designed to prevent a dog or cat from licking its own wounds.
That eliminated nearly everything else.
I'll ask for help, I thought. I looked around and realized that I was in an abandoned quadrant of this particular Home Depot. I would literally have to shout--loudly--to get anyone's attention. Far, far, far away in the center aisle I saw people going by, and they were walking at a normal pace; which provided me the only evidence that civilization had not yet ended out there.
I stood vigil by the lamps for a few minutes, continuing to check the boxes and floor samples (which were not on the floor, but rather on a shelf that was neck high to me), hoping to catch someone coming by.
Well, a few minutes passed and I left my cart there and ventured a few aisles in. I came back quickly and found my cart gone and an employee sweeping. "Oh, my cart," I said, and he said, "Oh, he took it."
So in the 30 seconds I did step away from my aisle not just one but two employees came by. Anyway, he was nice and went off to get my cart. A full minute later (his journey was that long) he returned with it. It was the same cart because I recognized the two crumpled up receipts inside.
I asked him for help and he went off to find someone. I've now been standing in front of these lamps attempting to protect an empty cart and two crumpled up receipts for about 15 minutes. I'm impatient in an empty 7-11 that has exactly what I want. A guy finally comes and we quickly determine that they have nothing I really want. I decide to buy a floor lamp with ugly pet-cone shades, throw it in the cart, and begin my trek over to the houseplants section.
The plants are not labeled with much specificity, I find, and this is a problem for me. See, Frank, my terrorist cat, is a particular terror on plants. He eats them when he can get to them and I want to buy something non-toxic. So I had done some research. Using an ASPCA list of non-toxic plants, since my apartment is quite dark, I cross-checked my book on houseplants and selected a few that would thrive in low or moderate light.
I picked two plants through this process last evening, wrote them down, and hit the road this morning figuring this will be easy. Home Depot, however, labels their plants in "plant groupings," and I had no confidence from reading the label that the plant I was buying would in fact be any plant in particular, let alone know whether it is toxic or non-toxic. So I asked for help. A woman said, "I'll be right back," and walked off holding a giant sale sign she was apparently about to hang nearby.
I waited. I saw many plants that looked pretty, or lush, green ones, that I would want in my house. But they were labeled things like "Tropical Group 2," so who knew what they were?
I waited. A few more hotties in store uniforms walked by. (Some of them were also labeled "Tropical Group 2," I think.) The woman finally came back into view. She stood and talked to a fellow employee--a door greeter-- then another customer asked her a question and she went to take care of him for a few seconds. After directing him, she went and stood near a forklift over to my right for a while, looking around for something. I realized that I had slipped her mind, or perhaps she just looked remarkably like the other employee who had said she'd help me so, so long ago.
I started to approach her just as she got on the forklift and began to operate it. "Were you the one who was going to come back and help me?" I asked in as sweet, non-judgmental voice as I could muster under my "Grumpy Level: McCain!" circumstances.
"Oh! Yes! Sorry!" she said.
The thing about this experience is that every single employee was nice as hell. It was not a good shopping experience for me, though, because of the relative lack of population density. The great, Tibetan desert-like expanses that existed between the plumbing section for your bathroom and the plumbing section for your kitchen overwhelm the abilities of even nice, helpful people to do anything about the bad customer experience.
It's the system.
They didn't have these plants but said they could order them. I said I may do that if this other nursery I know down San Fernando Road in Glendale doesn't have it. I walked off with my cart. An exceptionally cute young employee came up to me and tried to get me to take his pamphlet from him. Since "taking his pamphlet" was meant in the literal sense, and wasn't some steamy metaphor for ravaging him, I declined his kind offer and moved my lecherous ass along this stretch of Tibetan desert on my way to find the check-out lines.
Well, on my way to find the check-out lines I had a moment to look at the lamp I had picked out. I didn't really want this lamp. I wanted another lamp, one that doesn't exist for this price in this Home Depot. I ducked my cart into the bathroom fixtures section, passed by a young woman customer who'd decided to perch herself in one of their bathroom displays to make her cell phone call--she may have been lost and calling for help or rescue, but I suspect she was arranging a hook up with one of these hot employees--and ditched my cart next to a particularly gaudy faucet display. I figure the one thing the system does well is pick up shopping carts.
I took off, cruised two hot, unemployed men during my long wait to get out of the parking lot, then took off up San Fernando Road. I drove about three miles and remembered far too late about the endless construction work under and around the 134 Freeway. The nursery was just seven blocks ahead of me now, but traffic from three lanes was being funneled into one lane to get under the freeway, and it wasn't moving.
So I cut out and snuck through the neighborhood, found another way under and around the 134 Freeway which had bifurcated this whole neighborhood long ago, and then snaked my way back to San Fernando Road just on the other side of the freeway.
My experience at the smaller nursery replicated the experience in the Home Depot with a few minor differences that included A) my time standing around waiting was only three minutes instead of thirty--so it was ten times better in that department, and B) there were no gorgeous young men smiling sweetly at me at any time during the entire shopping experience--so it was ten times worse overall. In fact, I only encountered grouchy, bickering middle aged men. I could have just stayed home and looked in the mirror for that.
How the experience was similar was that they didn't have what I wanted.
After one man sent me across an alleyway to the outdoor plant section, the outdoor section man first lectured me on how those are indoor plants so I was in the wrong section. "Well, he just sent me out here to talk to you," I said. Well, then I got another earful, concluding with, "Nobody wants that. I don't carry them." I apparently picked out an ugly, unbecoming plant in one case, and a terribly unpopular one in the other; which only makes me want them more now, the poor little unwanted things.
I hadn't thought to bring all my reference materials with me on this excursion, which I will definitely do if I ever get around to trying to buy these plants again. As for the lamps, to hell with them. If living in the dark is good enough for Darkman, it should be good enough for me.
The point of all this, America and the world, is that I will not be able to help you dig out of the economic hole we're in. Sorry. While my income and debt load barely qualify me to be a consumer in the first place, my apparent bad taste and general shopping ineptitude will likely preclude me from successfully buying anything other than what I need to get by from week to week from here on out.
What I did accomplish during all of this was to spend about two hours either standing on concrete looking longingly down long aisles, or sitting in traffic listening to people discuss the BP oil disaster and the near impossibility of any individual successfully cutting his or her carbon emissions by even half. This bummed me out so much I turned my air conditioning all the way up. Fuck it, right?
It's the system's fault, you see. It's too big to fail, but it's also too big to succeed.
I set out with a simple plan: Buy 2 lamps and 2 plants. The Home Depot a mile down FIgueroa seemed like a good bet, the one directly under the 110-5 Interstate Interchange and just over the hill from Dodgers Stadium. The trip's fairly short and there's no construction on Figueroa. Plus on the way in and out of the parking lot I get to check out a lot of hot (literally) unemployed men.
(They always wave and smile at me on the way out, hoping I'll need them to come home with me and help me with my day project. Unfortunately, the type of day project I have in mind does not match the one they're prepared to do. But it is an opportunity for me to have eye contact with hot men, an increasingly rare experience in life.)
I always find the Home Depot experience daunting. Anything that has 34 aisles, including an A and a B section to each aisle, plus an entirely separate outdoor section, can be overwhelming even for someone with `shopping patience' or even someone who actually enjoys shopping. I sometimes find an empty 7-11 overwhelming, so I'll admit that the second I stepped in the store a low-grade anxiety began to hum in me.
But there were people to ask, and one of them was cute, covered in tattoos, and even volunteered to walk me to the lamp section, and I had seen where the plants were on the way in; so I wasn't so anxious.
Until I started trying to pick out a lamp. The last thing I want to do is buy a lamp that requires a special bulb. One of those elongated flame-shaped bulbs, for instance. All this will do is require me to do more shopping. If I can't pick it up in the place where I do my food shopping, forget it.
So that eliminated every table lamp in my admittedly low price range.
I also don't want the lamp "shades" to be those milky plastic cones that look one step above the artistic quality one finds in a pet cone designed to prevent a dog or cat from licking its own wounds.
That eliminated nearly everything else.
I'll ask for help, I thought. I looked around and realized that I was in an abandoned quadrant of this particular Home Depot. I would literally have to shout--loudly--to get anyone's attention. Far, far, far away in the center aisle I saw people going by, and they were walking at a normal pace; which provided me the only evidence that civilization had not yet ended out there.
I stood vigil by the lamps for a few minutes, continuing to check the boxes and floor samples (which were not on the floor, but rather on a shelf that was neck high to me), hoping to catch someone coming by.
Well, a few minutes passed and I left my cart there and ventured a few aisles in. I came back quickly and found my cart gone and an employee sweeping. "Oh, my cart," I said, and he said, "Oh, he took it."
So in the 30 seconds I did step away from my aisle not just one but two employees came by. Anyway, he was nice and went off to get my cart. A full minute later (his journey was that long) he returned with it. It was the same cart because I recognized the two crumpled up receipts inside.
I asked him for help and he went off to find someone. I've now been standing in front of these lamps attempting to protect an empty cart and two crumpled up receipts for about 15 minutes. I'm impatient in an empty 7-11 that has exactly what I want. A guy finally comes and we quickly determine that they have nothing I really want. I decide to buy a floor lamp with ugly pet-cone shades, throw it in the cart, and begin my trek over to the houseplants section.
The plants are not labeled with much specificity, I find, and this is a problem for me. See, Frank, my terrorist cat, is a particular terror on plants. He eats them when he can get to them and I want to buy something non-toxic. So I had done some research. Using an ASPCA list of non-toxic plants, since my apartment is quite dark, I cross-checked my book on houseplants and selected a few that would thrive in low or moderate light.
I picked two plants through this process last evening, wrote them down, and hit the road this morning figuring this will be easy. Home Depot, however, labels their plants in "plant groupings," and I had no confidence from reading the label that the plant I was buying would in fact be any plant in particular, let alone know whether it is toxic or non-toxic. So I asked for help. A woman said, "I'll be right back," and walked off holding a giant sale sign she was apparently about to hang nearby.
I waited. I saw many plants that looked pretty, or lush, green ones, that I would want in my house. But they were labeled things like "Tropical Group 2," so who knew what they were?
I waited. A few more hotties in store uniforms walked by. (Some of them were also labeled "Tropical Group 2," I think.) The woman finally came back into view. She stood and talked to a fellow employee--a door greeter-- then another customer asked her a question and she went to take care of him for a few seconds. After directing him, she went and stood near a forklift over to my right for a while, looking around for something. I realized that I had slipped her mind, or perhaps she just looked remarkably like the other employee who had said she'd help me so, so long ago.
I started to approach her just as she got on the forklift and began to operate it. "Were you the one who was going to come back and help me?" I asked in as sweet, non-judgmental voice as I could muster under my "Grumpy Level: McCain!" circumstances.
"Oh! Yes! Sorry!" she said.
The thing about this experience is that every single employee was nice as hell. It was not a good shopping experience for me, though, because of the relative lack of population density. The great, Tibetan desert-like expanses that existed between the plumbing section for your bathroom and the plumbing section for your kitchen overwhelm the abilities of even nice, helpful people to do anything about the bad customer experience.
It's the system.
They didn't have these plants but said they could order them. I said I may do that if this other nursery I know down San Fernando Road in Glendale doesn't have it. I walked off with my cart. An exceptionally cute young employee came up to me and tried to get me to take his pamphlet from him. Since "taking his pamphlet" was meant in the literal sense, and wasn't some steamy metaphor for ravaging him, I declined his kind offer and moved my lecherous ass along this stretch of Tibetan desert on my way to find the check-out lines.
Well, on my way to find the check-out lines I had a moment to look at the lamp I had picked out. I didn't really want this lamp. I wanted another lamp, one that doesn't exist for this price in this Home Depot. I ducked my cart into the bathroom fixtures section, passed by a young woman customer who'd decided to perch herself in one of their bathroom displays to make her cell phone call--she may have been lost and calling for help or rescue, but I suspect she was arranging a hook up with one of these hot employees--and ditched my cart next to a particularly gaudy faucet display. I figure the one thing the system does well is pick up shopping carts.
I took off, cruised two hot, unemployed men during my long wait to get out of the parking lot, then took off up San Fernando Road. I drove about three miles and remembered far too late about the endless construction work under and around the 134 Freeway. The nursery was just seven blocks ahead of me now, but traffic from three lanes was being funneled into one lane to get under the freeway, and it wasn't moving.
So I cut out and snuck through the neighborhood, found another way under and around the 134 Freeway which had bifurcated this whole neighborhood long ago, and then snaked my way back to San Fernando Road just on the other side of the freeway.
My experience at the smaller nursery replicated the experience in the Home Depot with a few minor differences that included A) my time standing around waiting was only three minutes instead of thirty--so it was ten times better in that department, and B) there were no gorgeous young men smiling sweetly at me at any time during the entire shopping experience--so it was ten times worse overall. In fact, I only encountered grouchy, bickering middle aged men. I could have just stayed home and looked in the mirror for that.
How the experience was similar was that they didn't have what I wanted.
After one man sent me across an alleyway to the outdoor plant section, the outdoor section man first lectured me on how those are indoor plants so I was in the wrong section. "Well, he just sent me out here to talk to you," I said. Well, then I got another earful, concluding with, "Nobody wants that. I don't carry them." I apparently picked out an ugly, unbecoming plant in one case, and a terribly unpopular one in the other; which only makes me want them more now, the poor little unwanted things.
I hadn't thought to bring all my reference materials with me on this excursion, which I will definitely do if I ever get around to trying to buy these plants again. As for the lamps, to hell with them. If living in the dark is good enough for Darkman, it should be good enough for me.
The point of all this, America and the world, is that I will not be able to help you dig out of the economic hole we're in. Sorry. While my income and debt load barely qualify me to be a consumer in the first place, my apparent bad taste and general shopping ineptitude will likely preclude me from successfully buying anything other than what I need to get by from week to week from here on out.
What I did accomplish during all of this was to spend about two hours either standing on concrete looking longingly down long aisles, or sitting in traffic listening to people discuss the BP oil disaster and the near impossibility of any individual successfully cutting his or her carbon emissions by even half. This bummed me out so much I turned my air conditioning all the way up. Fuck it, right?
It's the system's fault, you see. It's too big to fail, but it's also too big to succeed.