My wife went to Nordstrom yesterday, bought a nice blouse and a some earrings–costume earrings, yes, but very attractive–and somehow spent $14. As in fourteen dollars. I didn’t even know it was physically possible to spend $14 at Nordstrom. I didn’t think the cash registers went below $100. I once looked at silk handkerchiefs there until I saw they were $105. Each. Those must be some silkworms. They can probably talk. Sears had silk handkerchiefs for five bucks, like you can tell the difference? A piece of colored silk jammed in the breast pocket is a piece of colored silk jammed in the breast pocket. But my wife spent $14 at Nordstrom. The fools sent her a $20 discount certificate and she finds $34 worth of stuff. Hell, I didn’t even know they had anything for $34 dollars in Nordstrom–two things at that. At first I thought she went to J.C. Penney’s. Everything in Penney’s cost $14. Or ought to. But my wife had the Nordstrom sales slip. It said right on it: $14. As in fourteen dollars. So I figure someone must have bought the blouse and earrings for $14 at Penney’s but decided to return them and so returned them to Nordstrom . It’s much easier that way. Nordstrom will take anything. The story goes a lady took a set of tires back to Nordstrom to get her money back. Nordstrom doesn’t sell tires. But the lady insisted that she bought them there. So they refunded her the money. They not only refunded her the money but bought her lunch in the cafe and let talk to the silkworms. Now that’s what I call customer service.
Category Archives: Shopping
Costco
So a Costco membership is fifty five dollars? You give them $55 for the privilege of giving them more money when you actually buy stuff? Am I missing something? That’s a workable business model? It must be. It’s like Scientology for shoppers. Do they wear the Star Trek uniforms too? No, they don’t, not yet. But the Costco parking lot near us is a little creepy, all those hordes of people with that identical expression. I can’t explain it, sort of a fanatically determined shopping look. A couple weeks ago I was going to one of the restaurants nearby and parked on the Costco side of the lot. Big mistake. As soon as I got out of the car and began walking in the wrong direction I was spotted, detected, sensed somehow, and the people turned on me. We’re going to Costco, come with us. I said no, I was going somewhere else. They said you’re going to Costco. I said no I wasn’t. They said you are and I started to get nervous. But I’m not a member I said. You can sign up, they said. But I don’t want to sign up I said. You don’t want to be a member they said? Not for $55 I said. Why not they said. I don’t feel like paying that much to go to a store. They said sure you do. I said no I don’t. They said come on, just sign up. I said no, it’s expensive and it’s a hassle. They said it’s easy. Easy? Yes, easy. All you have to do is fall asleep. It’s painless.
$55 is not painless. So I ran. They ran after me. You are not of the body they yelled, chasing me down with their shopping carts piled high with 100 roll packages of toilet paper. I ran for my life. Then the siren wailed and they all stopped, turned around and walked towards the store. Weena stop I cried. But she went into the store with them. Down came the iron doors. Weena was in there. Frantic, I ran out into Los Feliz Boulevard, waving my arms and yelling. Listen to me! Listen to me! Those people that are coming after me, they’re not human! You fools! You’re in danger! Can’t you see? They’re after all of us! Our wives, our children, everyone on your shopping list! You’re next! You’re next! You’re–and I was flattened by a big Costco Truck. The police opened the back and it was filled floor to ceiling with 100 roll packages of toilet paper. More toilet paper than you have ever seen in your life. You gotta tell them. You gotta tell them. Costco toilet paper is made out of people.
Turkey
So as always, I just went out to get the turkey. I always wait till Thanksgiving Eve, because I prefer a fresh turkey. The frozen ones are so plebian, so hoi polloi, so common. So I went to the Ralphs on Colorado in Glendale, since our Ralphs is now an empty shell where a Ralphs used to be. Made a bee line for the turkeys. Unfortunately the frozen turkeys were no longer common, they weren’t even uncommon, in fact they were gone. The fresh turkeys were gone too. All that remained were two organic, free range fresh turkeys for those easily guilt ridden, but $66 for a turkey seemed nuts. They had lots of hams, though, and even more chickens, and I briefly considered getting a roaster and a lot of breading. Instead, I got back in the car, and after a winding but traffic free excursion through hills with fabulous views of Forest Lawn, I made it to the Vons on Los Feliz. We used to shop there ages ago, but apparently Glendale is rich now, as the prices were ridiculous. But they had turkeys, lots of turkeys. Frozen ones. Ran out of the fresh ones days ago the guy at the meat counter said. He picked a bird out of the cooler. This one’s thawing nicely already. Just soak it in the sink and watch TV all night. Sigh. A people’s turkey. Feeling the Bern. I dumped it in the cart and headed towards produce. And what beautiful produce it was too. Lush and green and ripe and snappy apple red. All I needed were Brussels sprouts. They had one. One single Brussels sprout. It looked like an absurd little cabbage. All about were the bits and pieces of sprouts, like there’d been a Brussels sprout riot. I considered getting the last one and letting my family fight over it, but no. I even looked for frozen Brussels sprouts, but they too were gone, meaning there are more than a few people in Glendale who can’t cook. No one seemed to be interested in the frozen Brussels sprouts in butter sauce. So I wandered about doing some last minute shopping and marveling at all the beautiful women doing their last minute shopping too. Suddenly the Vons in Glendale, in the wrong part of Glendale at that, is a babe magnet, like an Armenian Beverly Center. Though they were of every race and color, actually, lovely, and young enough to be my daughters. Grand daughters. Life, even in a post-racial society, can be cruel.
In the car again, heading up Brand. How would I face my family tomorrow without Brussel sprouts? The only time anybody ever eats the damn things is at Thanksgiving when it’s the law. Somewhere in Atwater it hit me….Gelson’s. Maybe they would have them. They would be solid gold, but they would have them. Which they did. They even had parking. I grabbed two packages full of the things. Gelson’s wraps their Brussels sprouts in little mesh bags. Very neat. Not a hint of a riot. The pall of familial holiday disgrace fell away and I walked though the aisles full of confidence and swagger, two big mesh bags of Brussels sprouts dangling from my hand in one hell of a manly metaphor.
Incidentally, you can spend $120 on a turkey at Gelson’s. I saw one, eighteen pounds, $120. That’s twice as much as the organic free range bird at Ralphs. Maybe these turkeys were organic, free range and veterinarian-assisted suicides.
What an inane post. I wrote it in my head as I drove between stores. Maybe I need a hobby.
Still no coffee table
Still no coffee table, but a groovy wooden chair, bi-colored, for El Nino to warp beyond recognition, or Sketch. Found it at the Goodwill in Glassell Park that used to be the world’s most berserk K-Mart. I remember when a team of physicists from Cal Tech went in there to study Brownian Motion and were never seen again. Some say they were atomized by a Blue Light Special. Some say they married Armenians in the shoe department. Some say they were sold as patio fixtures. Soon afterward K Mart closed and remained empty and silent but for the screeches of gulls. Suddenly, as if by magic, it became a Goodwill. Or a Goodwill Galleria. There’s even a Goodwill Outlet Store. That’s a concept that made me think for a moment. The stuff poor people and hipsters didn’t buy winds up at the outlet store. Is there a 99 cent store outlet store? Anyway inside the Goodwill Galleria it’s like a Goodwill mall and there’s a store and a diner and planters and various offices and doorways and places, and it’s all very clean and orderly and friendly. We went through the double doors into the regular store. No coffee table. Well, coffee tables, but not what we’re looking for. Especially as we aren’t looking for beat up crap. Some people who shop at thrift stores for furniture are picky. Snooty even. That’s us. So we turned our noses up at the crappy, junky, or nice but wrongly shaped coffee tables and fixed our eyes, instead, on the groovy chair. $4.99. Plus our old people discount. We are old at Goodwill. We’re at that awkward age where we are old enough for senior discounts at thrift stores or on the little tram thing at the Zoo, but we pay full price at movie theaters.
Anyway, it’s a nice chair. Perhaps you’ll sit in it and feel special.
I also bought three LPs. One, inexplicably, by the Amboy Dukes, since I don’t like the Amboy Dukes. Another, mysteriously, by Harry Nilsson, as I have never bought an album by Harry Nilsson before. And the last one was what they used to call a loss leader, which was logical, because I have always dug loss leaders. I remember they used to cost a dollar or a quarter or something from Warner Brothers and would be full of tunes. I discovered things though those comps. Will I discover anything here? I only recognize one song (Dixie Chicken). I feel myself being dragged back into the 70’s. Stupid clothes and easy sex and Deep Purple in leisure suits. Disco Monk.
The only jazz I saw were some John Klemmer albums, all smooth, though I didn’t look very far. The record stacks were in a mess. I remembered why I had stopped looking for records at thrift stores. Then I remembered once finding an extremely rare Sun Ra LP between the Mantovani and Barbara Streisand at a thrift store in Pasadena, which I later sold for a lot more money to some excited vinyl geek, so I looked a little more. But I quickly gave up on finding another Sun Ra album, or even a Turk Murphy LP. Of course, had I found even one jazz album, I would likely not have bought this Amboy Dukes album, which, with the Nilsson album, had been pulled out of the stacks by some nerd along with a Dave Clark 5 album, which was a mess, played to death. So I think I bought those records because they were sitting there. I hate to think what else I would have bought had it been sitting there.
I also got a highly technical volume on dinosaurs, full of the long latin names and arcane anatomy that makes me such a hit at parties. Then we stood in the check out line behind two guys in dresses buying more dresses. Sparkly, spangly dresses, short and shiny dresses. They couldn’t buy all of them, apparently, and sighed and tsked and went back and forth trying to decide among the little pile. As they debated they talked girl talk with the pretty checker, who was much more girl in the right places than they could ever be, which bothered them. Ah well the one said, and went back to deciding on which dresses to buy. They held them up and debated the colors in Spanish. Purple was azul, pink a roja. The clerk threw us a glance and smiled. I flipped through my dinosaur book. Outside the glass doors a cold wind was blowing and everything seemed frozen to the touch, and the new moon was a hint on the horizon.
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