Shopping

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?

Williams-Sonoma is having a 20%-off sale on All-Clad. The 1.5-quart saucepan, which I’ve been coveting for awhile, is marked down from $109 to $87. Add the Arizona sales tax of almost 10% and you’re back at $95, not that big a deal.

Cookware & More has a 1.5-quart irregular for $71.40, but they’re not tellin’ what the shipping charges are until you actually order the thing up. That suggests shipping is pretty high.

At Amazon.com, the same pan, not irregular, can be had for $79.95 and free shipping.

Something to know about. 🙂

Over at Wealth Informatics, proprietor Suba has posted a great article on her struggle to manage time and work. This, it develops, is a function of procrastination. Suba is a fine artist of procrastination, and what she describes as going on in her self-employed worklife is exactly what’s going on here. She kept track of how she was spending her work hours, much as a lawyer filling out time sheets would do. The result was enlightening. A huge amount of time was absorbed with e-mail, cruising the Web, writing comments on other people’s sites, and participating in social media. More was taken up by unproductive breaks that devolved into TV watching.

If someone were to hover over my shoulder, they’d find the same thing happening here. I don’t watch TV much, especially not doing the day (on the broadcast spectrum there’s just flat nothing to see). But I do pass unholy amounts of time on e-mail, reading websites, and adding comments to news reports and bloggers’ posts. Most of this is an absolute waste. And I’ve got a bad feeling that the sense that I’m working way too hard is aggravated by the fact that I’m not working very productively. Yes, I spend a lot of time in front of the computer. But…to what avail? How much am I really getting done?

Suba has come up with three interesting strategies to deal with this issue:

1. Ditch the “to-do” list and create a “NOT-to-do” list, designed to deflect the time-suckers.
2. Physically leave the house to do work. Suba has taken to going to a library to work.
3. Use an add-on such as LeechBlock, StayFocused, or Nanny for Chrome to block time-wasting sites during work hours.

LOL! I’d have to register an awful lot of sites to to make those blockers work!

The idea of going someplace else for actual work, however, is a great one. As I noted last week in a comment on someone else’s site (where, I no longer recall…tellingly!), the advantage of going to an office is that you don’t have all the work that needs to be done around a house nagging at you.

When I’m in my self-employed mode (I’ve swung back and forth between wage slavery and self-employment all my adult life), a fair amount of each weekday is taken up with household chores: water plants, clean the pool & balance the water, take a swipe at cleaning the bathrooms, notice that I can’t stand the dust on the furniture so wipe that down, run to the grocery store, get gas on the way home, throw a load of laundry in the washer, fix a toilet, wash the dog…every one of those antics takes up a chunk of time. To make up for it, I work later at night and over the weekends. The advantage of being at an employer’s office is that it forces you to focus your attention on the work at hand.

Those of us who work out of our home offices might spend a lot less time “working” if all we did was work.

Speaking of the self-employed and those who wish they were, our PF blogging friends have been active of late.

At Dollars and Deadlines, Kelly describes a simple marketing strategy that we all can and should do regularly.

The Financial Blogger has a nice post on building a money-making blog, with some fresh ideas that go well beyond the usual pabulum on this well-worn subject.

At Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, Crystal and Mr. BFS have found something real to absorb their time: a brand-new, very swell home! The excitement knows no bounds.

While we’re on the subject of housing, over at Musings of an Abstract Aucklander, eemusings has an entertaining history of her life in renting.

Revanche has two posts describing her strategy for promotion and a pay increase, which, after an amazing amount of effort and stress, worked.

Evan reflects on his five-year tenure at his job—a sixth of his lifetime! Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near…

At I Pick Up Pennies, Abigail frets about the cost of having the in-laws occupying their backyard studio. This is likely to be a challenge facing thousands of youngish Americans, as the Baby Boomers age and discover that between the cost of Medicare and the rising cost of living, too little is left from Social Security and savings to support them without help from the kids.

Those of us who don’t yet have to move in with our sons and daughters might take a look at Boomer and Echo’s post on turning 50. Best way to stay out of the kids’ backyard is to plan ahead. Way ahead.

At Money Crush, Jackie grumbles about the implied jealousy (and laziness) of the “wish I could do that” set.

And speaking of self-employment, have you ever heard of a financial dominatrix? Ab. So. Lute. Ly. Amazing! Once again I was born forty years too soon…

Nicole and Maggie, over at Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured, are talking about cutting back on blogging. And at Not of General Interest, Undine notes that quite a few other academic bloggers have had the same idea.

At Free from Broke, Miranda holds forth on the recent flap over HR departments and prospective employers asking people for access to their Facebook sites. That falls into the “wonders never cease” category.

Money Beagle posted a thoughtful piece on the way some seemingly expensive costs are offset by various side benefits of the expensive service or thing.

Frugal Scholar asks if you can bargain on furniture. If Blogger would let me comment on FS’s site without having to sign up to create a Blogger blog, I’d have commented that you certainly can. Many furniture stores will come down on the price if you ask nicely. I once got a Stickley table that was already on sale simply by asking the salesperson if he could do any better. At Crate & Barrel, about which FS wonders, sales staff don’t seem to be empowered to give discounts; however, they will tell you if they know a piece will go on sale in the near future, and one person there offered to call me and let me know when a coveted item was scheduled to go on sale.

Time to go sing. Have a happy weekend—what’s left of it.

Was that a hallucination? Did anyone else see it?

The other day at the Safeway I went to buy a couple of yellow onions. Bounced off the onion bin like it had a forcefield around it. They wanted 99 cents apiece!

A dollar for an onion? One ordinary yellow onion?

Really? Really????

So I walked around the bin to see if they had any smaller, punier numbers they might be trying to get rid of. Found one narrow shelf that at one time had these, which the Safeway was peddling for 49 cents apiece. All the half-dollar onions were gone but two, each of which was bruised and starting to rot.

I could not freaking believe it.

So left the Safeway onionless, figuring to pick up some onions at a more reasonable price at one of the ethnic markets. My schedule being what it is, though, of course I never made it to Lee Lee’s or El Rancho. The larder is empty of onion.

Maybe I should plant some in the back yard. Wonder if they’ll grow here in the winter?

You can’t make this stuff up.