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Competitive Shopping at the Home Depot

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What on earth IS it with people? Is there a reason to believe you’re in a my-loot-or-my-life competition when you’re wandering around a Home Depot in the middle of a weekday and there’s hardly anybody there? No kidding. Get this amazing Shopping Adventure…

So I finish a project and to reward myself for chugging through writing a difficult proposal by midday (!), I decide to run up to Home Depot. Needed are the following:

• Citrus fertilizer
• Miracle-Gro (I know, I know! it’s NOT organic!!!!)
• Trees: consider what if anything might replace the remaining Devil-Pod Tree on the west side of the house, which makes an unholy mess even though it doesn’t drop its mess into the pool
• Sample of the darkest burnt-umber brown paint I can find
• Quart of glaze in which to dilute the above paint
• Swimming pool acid
• Sprinkler gadget for irrigation system, to replace the ones Charlie has eaten
• One common pine or fir board, 77.25 inches x 12 inches

At the front door, they’ve parked their special of the day: desert willows (fragrant with blooms) in giant boxes,  just $89. Oooooh! Very nice.

Get a flatbed cart. Order up the paint. Pick up a can of glaze and a sponge to use for my ingenious craft project (more about which someday).

Roll the cart toward the lumber department, where I need to buy a board to extend a shelf in the storage-room closet. Start to search for an employee.

The lumber dept has three aisles. Search all three aisles. Go back and search again. No sign of life. Nowhere. No how.

Disgusted, give up. Go back to retrieve my flatbed cart.

Uhmmmmm…. Where IS the flatbed cart??? Search around, again hiking through all three aisles. Finally I spot it: two fat people, male and female—apparently a matched set—have snabbed it and are loading pieces of baseboard moulding onto it. They haven’t even bothered to throw my goods onto the floor!

Guess they figured when they got to the check-out they’d just tell the cashier they’d changed their collective mind, eh?

Figuring I’m never going to find a guy to help wrangle a giant board and saw it to size, I walk over to these clowns and collect my paint, sponge, and glaze off my former cart. The two don’t even bother to say “oh! is that YOURS?” They just stand there and look smug.

I am effing furious. As I’m marching toward the front of the store in an obvious rage, I’m accosted by not one, not two, but THREE salespeople. Ohh, what could be the matter? What might I want to buy? How can we help?

Grrrrrrrrrrrr.  “All I want is to find a checkout that doesn’t require me to jump through the self-service hoops and does not require me to hike halfway to Timbuktu to pay and then halfway back from Timbuktu to get to my car!”

“Right this way, ma’am” (don’t you hate it when they call you “ma’am,” in recognition of your advanced and much disdained age?). He directs me to the returns desk.

“She’s not gonna take my money,” I say. “She’s the returns lady!”

“Oh, I promise you, ma’am [arrhgh! KILLLLLL], she’ll check you out.”

“I’m sure she will. Thanks very much.”

I remember that I also need pool acid and tree fertilizer, and so march past this obsequious soul, headed for the outdoor department.

Nab a grocery cart; throw the armful of junk into it. Study the tree fertilizers. Citrus? Ordinary tree? Which is cheaper? Which is better? Decide that the made-for-Arizona citrus fertilizer is the best choice, because it will make the orange and lemon trees happy and probably will not annoy the other trees much. Plus at $19 for 40 pounds, it’s a pretty good buy.

A guy is standing there with me, also perusing the tree fertilizers. He grabs a 40-pound bag of the fertilizer. And then another. And then another. And then another.

He loads the ENTIRE INVENTORY of 40-pound citrus fertilizer bags onto his rolling flatbed cart!

Well. At least this one hasn’t stolen my cart.

Not one bag of the almost reasonably priced fertilizer is left. The choice is 20-pound bags of wildly overpriced fertilizer or nothing. I opt for nothing.

I pick up the pool acid and roll my grocery cart toward the garden department checkout stand. As I’m rolling up to the cashier, only one of whom is on duty, some guy comes racing up and CUTS ME OFF!

YES. He charges in front of me. He’s gotta get there FIRST!

God forfend that he not win in the Great Competition That Is Shopping at Home Depot.

Usually I hate shopping at HD because of the sometimes shoddy goods, the occasionally flakey staff, or (as in the lumber department today) the utter absence of any staff, competent or not. It’s a rare day that I hate shopping at Home Depot because of its clientele. But today, it must be said, truly took the cake.

About two of every three visits to Home Depot, I come away asking myself why do I shop in this place? The answer is obvious, of course: they’ve forced all the local merchants, who used to provide consistently quality goods and consistently excellent service, out of business. HD is now the only game in town, except for a sad Lowe’s some miles away or the occasional Ace Hardware that may or may not carry what I need. That notwithstanding: I do hate shopping at Home Depot.

Et vous? Ever wish those fine old locally owned hardware and lumber stores were still with us? What do you miss most about the good old pre-Box days?

LinkedIn…Gronk!

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Got LinkedIn? Here’s something to keep you amused: Go to LastPass’s secure (we think ) tool to see if yours was one of the 6 million passwords recently stolen from LinkedIn. As you can see, mine was.

Entertaining.

According to CNNTech’s Doug Gross, all is not especially lost if you’re password was ripped off. The thieves still have to de-encrypt them. If you were clever enough to concoct a complicated mess of a password, or if you use a hash-em-up tool like LastPass, KeePass, or 1Password, and if you were wily enough to invent a different password for every site you habituate, then you’re probably not at much risk. Still, you certainly should change your LinkedIn password. Matter of fact, you should change all your passwords every now and again.

The aftermath of the great LinkedIn caper has been a flood of scam e-mails. So be alert and don’t click on any links from any source you don’t recognize.

By the way, BBC quotes LinkedIn Director Vicente Silveira as saying, “Members that have accounts associated with the compromised passwords will notice that their LinkedIn account password is no longer valid.” That may or may not be so: The password I ran through the LastPass tool, eliciting the big orange warning above, worked just fine on the site.

Networking

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Trying to kick The Copyeditor’s Desk into high gear: improve networking efforts online and face-to-face; tell the world who we are and what we can do for them.

Around editing 40 pages for a client and teaching a class that goes till after 9:00 p.m., I wrote Newsletter #1, compiled a Contacts list in Google, and this morning shipped the copy off to 57 people. Minutes later it was out the door to a meeting of a freshly a-borning chapter of a large women’s business networking group.

It was pretty interesting. Had a good time meeting the various proprietors of various small businesses. Had an OK lunch at an expensive restaurant perched on the side of a fake lake. Handed out a bunch of cards; collected a bunch of cards. Heard the pitch for why we should join up. Three hundred dollah a year and $20 a lunch. Two meetings a month. If you’re not a member, you don’t get to give your 60-second commercial.

So…how to tell whether a group like this is worth it?

Well, it looks to me like the value of a networking group depends on whether a certain number of the members meet the criteria of the kind of client you realistically can help, and the kind of client who can afford you. Most of the folks I met there were one-person shops: very, very tiny businesses that depend entirely on the talent and industry of their sole proprietors.

The networking group I do belong to mostly consists of small businesses, but only one is a true one-man operation. Some, maybe most of them, could in theory afford what we want (and need) to earn for our services.

The friend who invited me to today’s shindig is a chiropractor. Most of the women there were middle-aged and older: full of aches and pains. They represented a rich vein of potential patients for his practice. But for a couple of editors? Maybe not so much.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you need to pick your networking groups to fit your business. The members need to have some need for your service or product and they must be able to afford you. They need to be in your business’s demographic—that is, the kind of people who are interested in whatever you offer—and they should be open to your specific kind of marketing.

The ladies were perfect for the chiropractor but way off the screen for a publications consultant. One woman was waving around a couple of books she’d self-published. If she’d sprung for one of our designers, she could have promoted her business with books that looked like they’d come from a real, mainstream publisher. But had I suggested that to her, back when she was in the production stage, chances are she would have ignored it. She either would have felt she couldn’t afford a designer’s $50/hour fare, or she would figure that writing and self-publishing a book was something she could do herself, with Amazon’s help. One way or another—whether she hired me or not—I’d be wasting my time courting her.

Work smart. Network smart.

Privacy: A thing of the past?

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Big Brother is watching you…

Over at Prairie Ecothrifter, a lively conversation is going on about the steadily increasing loss of privacy. Ecothrifter has written a great post on the subject, one of my favorite hobbyhorses.

The interesting thing is the number of people who actually don’t seem to be bothered by this! Every time one of these discussions arises, someone says something like “I don’t care much as long as I am not harmed.” Right. As though loss of your liberty to do as you please and to come and go as you please without somebody’s nose up your you-know-what is not harm? As though silently gathering information that not only can be used to pester you with more and more advertising but can actually be used against you in a court of law is not harm?

Apparently most Americans don’t value their privacy, and so all of us, including those who do, have lost our privacy.

My tinfoil hat isn’t shiny enough to lead me to wallpaper the rooms and ceiling with matching foil. However, I do take some steps to cling to a few shreds of privacy:

• Don’t carry your Social Security card around with you.
• Don’t hire on to jobs that require fingerprinting (these include everything from teacher to real estate sales agent).
• Refrain from entering information in social media—tell Facebook, Twitter, & Linked-In as little as possible about yourself, or actually dispense disinformation.
• And ask Facebook “friends” not to “tag” you in photos.
• Lie yourself stupid when people ask for information that’s none of their business! Give out fake phone numbers, fake addresses, and whenever possible, fake names. Safeway, for example, thinks it’s doing business with my deceased dog, whose telephone number is the same as Safeway’s corporate headquarters’.
• Wear broad-brimmed hats in public so it’s harder for camera snoops to capture an image of your face.
• If you still use checks, have a fake phone number printed on them.
• Don’t carry around cell phones and pads that can track your location, or if you must, turn off the geolocator function. If you can…
• Do business only with retailers that don’t demand personal information in exchange for a fair price.
• Don’t buy things off the Internet.

There’s a difference, IMHO, between what Crystal describes in her comment—willingly sharing information that’s culturally regarded as “private”—and surreptitious gathering of information, aggressively forcing information from you, or invading your private space (as in fingerprinting you when you’re the victim of a crime or as in X-raying your naked body through your clothes or as in listening in on your phone conversations and e-mail).

If you want to divulge things about yourself, fine. But what’s objectionable is the invasion of your privacy and the use of information gleaned by spying on you or by making you give it up against your will. Or aggregating that information without your knowledge. That is what we as individuals need to fight.

Resist!

Image: Telescreens from the movie 1984. © Rosenblum Productions, Inc.

Cardless in Gaza

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So about two hours after I’d called and canceled all my credit cards, the wallet resurfaced. {sigh}

Well, I was glad to get the driver’s license back, anyway. The hassle of canceling a credit card and moving all the automatic payments over to a new card number pales in comparison to the hassle of visiting an Arizona Department of Transportation office.

Even more so, I suspect, because ADOT thinks I never renewed my license.

Couple months ago, I got online to kipe a spare copy (I like to carry a spare in the car, so as to avoid lugging a purse EVERYwhere I go). Entered all the data, charged it up on a card, hit “SEND,” and got an error message: this license was never renewed.

So they think I’m driving around on an expired license, even though the current license with an expiration date some years in the future is sitting in my wallet.

I’ve been meaning to go in person to wrestle with the bureaucrats over this, but haven’t gotten around to it. And boy! Was I glad to see that thing come back! The last thing I wanted to do was go in and claim I had renewed a license that I no longer had in hand. Ugh.

Anyway, for the nonce none of my cards work, and it’ll be tomorrow or Wednesday before a functioning credit card reappears in these precincts.

It is amazing how dependent we get on our little habits. In my case, “little habits” includes using plastic for every transaction. I don’t carry cash at all. And the idea of writing a check in every store across the city just doesn’t compute.

Needed to buy gas before any of the new credit cards gets here. I had a meeting at the campus this morning; tomorrow I have a lunch meeting in Scottsdale, then to class way to heck & gone up at Union Hills; then Thursday another meeting in Scottsdale. So I went into Costco and bought a $50 cash card. Bought $20 worth of gasoline, which filled the tank a little over halfway. That should get me to campus once and Scottsdale twice. I hope. By Thursday the cards should be here and life can go on.

It’s funny how you forget. I find it hard to believe that I used to write a check for every. single. transaction, no matter how small or how large. Now it just seems like such a pain in the tuchus.

Interestingly, too, knowing that only XX number of dollars was on the cash card made me feel more cautious about spending money. Instead of filling the tank, I bought just enough gas to get by, figuring I’d use the remaining 30 bucks in Costco. But then decided not to go in…all I needed was bread, some maple syrup, and maybe a bottle of wine.

Why?

I can make my own bread, thank you. There’s no urgency to buy maple syrup. And as for the wine…the less of it in the house, the less of it I’ll drink.

Maybe there’s something to the idea that buying with cash helps you behave more frugally.

Think so?

Check Out My Guest Post at 101 Centavos!

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While the cat’s away, the mice will play! 101 Centavos invited me to write a guest post to fill space in his blog while he and the family are gallivanting around Italy. Ended up writing about what it’s like to live overseas with children. Check it out, and join the conversation: “would giving your children awesome experiences be a key consideration if thinking about moving overseas? Would you move overseas?”