For me, shopping is not an adventure, it’s a fucking mission.
Objective #1: Smartwool Socks
Store: Dick’s
Elapsed time: Under 10 minutes.
God would wear these socks. Dick’s is one of the few places I can get the hunting version. True, I don’t hunt (except for socks), but dam these suckers are comfortable, and they last for 5 years!
Objective # 2: Sweater
Store: Nordstrom
Elapsed Time: 16 Minutes
Nordstrom understands the American man and takes this into consideration when they design their stores. Meaning they typically locate the men’s department near an outside exit—no escalators, no hacking your way through a jungle of panties and no smelly trips through the cosmetics/perfume gauntlet. Easy recon, easy egress.
Objective # 3: Blu-ray DVD player
Store: Best Buy
Elapsed Time: 1 hr, 15 minutes
The Best Buy experience is kind of like entering a casino. No matter what you came to buy, you’re going to have to walk past a lot of distracting eye candy just to get to it. All this makes it difficult for a guy to reduce unplanned purchases. Still a man has to take responsibility for his own impulses. I figure if there are women who can enter a shoe store for sneakers and walk out with only that (as yet, an unproven hypothesis), then I can do the same with Best Buy.
The place looked like a retail war zone, with tags out of place, stock missing from the shelves, and a lot of dazed kids in blue shirts. Most of them shrugging their shoulders—even when I asked them something simple such as, “do you have any more of this model?”, or “where is the rest room?”. I didn’t dare go any more technical than that. It’s a cycle I’ve seen with this chain many times. After Christmas, it seems to take the average Best Buy store 6 to 10 months just to clean up rebuild their stocks. This is a sad thing for me to watch, cause I could live in this place.
Objective # 4: A Burger and a Beer (or 4)
Store: Redacted
Elapsed Time: 5 or so hours
Said burger was the real reason I chose to actually venture out and not just order all this shit on the web. Had I been married, this would have been a successful outing. The wife would have thought an entire afternoon dedicated to shopping reasonable. Little would she know that the average guy can handle such mission in less than 2 hours and spend the remainder of that time drinking beer. Mission accomplished.
