Capturing moments of life in a jar

[austin_dern]

Best Buy, a couple weeks back, sent an e-mail invitation to me to participate in an ``Exclusive Shopping'' session Sunday night at the next-nearest Best Buy to me. Naturally I was curious what might be so interesting about an ``Exclusive Shopping'' event following the normal close of business on a Sunday, since I still haven't quite got used to the strange United States practice of having all commerce come to a stop Sunday evenings. Didn't the Sabbatarian movement kind of wrap things up when they lost the Sunday Baseball issue?

What really piqued my curiosity was finding there were people lined up outside the store a half-hour before the scheduled ``Exclusive Shopping'' opening. I was curious what the people lined up for anticipated that it'd be worth waiting outside for, what with there no new scheduled iPhone releases or the like in the works. For my part, I went to the Arby's adjacent to get some fried mozzarella sticks and a small milkshake.

The obvious difference in the ``Exclusive Shopping'' session was that it happened later at night. And when I entered, instead of being pinned down in a crossfire of greetings from enough sales clerks to trigger my shyness-fed ``flee'' reflexes, they only said hello the once and gave out raffle tickets. And while clerks were darting about asking if I was having any trouble finding anything about as often as they did during the regular day, they also were offering cans of soda for anyone thirsty. If I hadn't had the milkshake I might have taken advantage of the offer.

And then came an oddity: they called that half-hour's raffle winner, and it turned out to be ... me. This seemed unlikely enough I checked my ticket against the whiteboard used to display the winning numbers several times over the course of five minutes before going to the front desk. They congratulated me, handed me the prize --- a gift card --- and went on to other business without, say, taking my photograph for promotional purposes or anything. I just showed up and they gave me something kind of money-like in some regards. That's not bad from my perspective.

Trivia: In 1669 King Louis XIV decreed that store signs in Paris must be taken down and redesigned to be at least three and a half feet off the ground and extend no more than two feet into the street, rather than being whatever size and position the shopkeepers liked, as previously obstructed traffic and made moot street lighting. Source: The Essence of Style: How The French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, And Glamour, Joan DeJean.

Currently Reading: This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Carmen M Reinhart, Kenneth S Rogoff. This is a definitive book on attempting to prove by way of carefully defined metrics that such things as financial folly happens and surprisingly often. I feel like an upper-level economics course just landed on my head. Not a word (that I noticed) about Dutch tulips, though, which I thought was the ``E = mc²'' of financial history writing, included as warmup material whether or not it's relevant.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I've yet to attend any of those, simply because they tend to be offered in precisely the hours in which I work.

The Best Buy's also a good half-hour drive away, and while in an area I'm not infrequently visiting, I find there's little there that's not a better deal at Amazon or NewEgg. Though I did pick up my Terabyte drive there.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, I can't see a half-hour's drive being worth it, unless you knew with certainty that they had something either unavailable or unavailable so cheaply to make it worthwhile, and of course you have that whole ``comfortable with Internet shopping'' thing to make Best Buy a tougher sell for you.

Me, I've got ones about five, ten, and fifteen miles from home, and the one that's fifteen miles from home is about a half-mile out of the way for the yoga center or the auto dealership. Weirdly, they're all quite close to Targets and Arby's for some reason.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

The closest Best Buy is very close to the Target, which is slightly more emphatic of a destination for me, due to the discount card for Virgin mobile they offer. (5 charges of $20 earn a $10 bonus credit; that plus a Target Visa add up to semi-frequent stops as it becomes the cheapest place for phone refills.)

--Chi

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Hm. This seems to suggest a weird Best Buy/Target location convergence. Hard to understand.

I hadn't thought of phone cards, although my prepaid phone would seem to lend itself to the purchase of them.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

The nearest Targets here are at the large mall (Crystal Mall) and the Big-Box-Stuff-mostly-mall (Lisbon Landing). The former having the Best Buy, and the next nearest Best Buy being.. Rhode Island or Hartford, probably, nothing at all close.

Target offers said plan across pretty much every prepaid phone company. Coupled with a Target Visa it makes for a reasonably additive savings.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Ah, now, additive savings ... That's one more of the many things I've never quite got working for me. I have an aunt who spends nearly all her free time world-traveling and she explains it's all done by using her airline credit card rightly, but I don't seem to have the knack for it myself. Meanwhile I think she's off to Paris for the weekend because Saturdays in Paris are so nice.