Capitalist Shrine

Spent a lovely lunch hour(s) today wandering the local upscale mall with my one and only. It was so peaceful and pleasant to stroll about by ourselves hand in hand, taking in the scenery. It was one of those infinite number of experiences in a lifetime, too pedestrian and normal to remember in twenty years, but so precious that you wish you could. If only there was some repository into which you could put those kinds of experiences, so that in the future you could pull them out and hold them up, and say “Look how happy we are together. See us holding hands, see us kissing on the escalator, see, see, see.”

Maybe that’s what a diary is – that repository you can put those things into, to be looked at another day. In any case, just let it be remembered that we had a nice time.

We went to Restoration Hardware first. Now, I am not a big shopping person – about the only stores I can ever “browse” in are bookstores. But this store I could wander around forever – the people who design their store layouts, and the people who set up their displays (with all those see through containers just asking you to take the item out and examine it), and the people who select and purchase the stuff they sell – these people know what they are doing.

In any case, we weren’t there to look at brass shower curtain rings, or rubber rain boots, or combination airplane altimeter / desk clocks, or hand-powered flashlights, or any of the other many things we ended up looking at. We were there to make a Big Purchase, a bed for one of the children. I just read an article in the Wall Street Journal about how the retail furniture industry sucks because none of it is computerized, and there are thousands of manufacturers, and there are no economies of scale, etc., all of which leads to the fact that whenever you order furniture, no matter what it is, you have to wait twelve weeks to get it. They had funny quotes from people saying they had custom-ordered Land Rovers that took less time to deliver than the ottoman in their living room.

Well to nobody’s surprise (especially the salesperson’s), after we filled out the requisite forms, the salesperson told us “That will take about ten to twelve weeks to come in.” The best part of the whole deal is that since we wanted a full-size bed, that made it a “Special Order” (as opposed to a “Plain Order”). And “Special Orders” require payment in full, up front. So now I have given you many hundreds of my dollars, which you can put in your interest-bearing corporate account, so you can make more money, while I don’t receive the agreed-upon compensation for the turning over of said money (one bed), for TWELVE WEEKS? Super.

Well, it’s not like we didn’t buy the bed or anything – don’t be silly.

Passed a big poster in the window of Express, showing a multi-cultural group of young women wearing what appeared to be hot pants. For younger viewers who may not know what “hot pants” are, I refer you to your grandparents record collection – they’re those flat, black, circular things with a hole in the middle. Find a record by Nancy Sinatra (yes, he had a daughter who made records) and observe the cover. You will probably be seeing “hot pants” (and “go-go boots”, but we’ll worry about that another time).

In any case, my love and I debated whether these girls were modeling hot pants or underwear, and hoped that it was underwear. I remember enough of the Hot Pants Era to know that it shared an important similarity with the Tube Top Era – 99.9% of the people who wore these fashions had no business being seen in them. These are fashions we do not need revived.

We got a cappuccino (glad my spell-checker told me there’s two C’s in that) at one of the trendy coffee places. I don’t drink coffee or any other coffee-related substances, but she gave me a taste, and I can see the attraction. Like most computer nerds, my caffeine injection of choice is Coke. I could see switching to coffee, as long as it had caffeine in it. Why do people drink decaf? It’s not like it tastes good – I mean, I don’t drink Coke because I LIKE it.

We passed through Restoration Hardware once more on the way out, to troll for Christmas presents for my father (notoriously hard to buy for). Found nothing, but passed more time picking up and looking at shiny objects that did interesting things.