I Might be Over-Socialized
Jul. 8th, 2006 09:11 pmToday, in a rising panic over the prospect of schlepping my stuff to Goettingen in a collection of plastic bags, I went out and bought a suitcase. It turns out (if any of you care) that TJ Maxx and Marshalls have both recently gotten in shipments of spiffy luggage, and I was able to acquire SwissGear suitcases for cheap. They're nice.
The pedantic among you will have noticed a peculiar disjoint in the paragraph above, between the singular and the plural.
Yeah, so, since we were in TJ's anyway,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
danceboy and I thought we'd look at stuff - shirts and cookwear and so on. We found me some nice shirts, one of which had no price tag. I brought everything I intended to buy to the register, including two suitcases.
The suitcases were the first things I put on the counter to ring up. They had to go up one at a time, but they did both go there, and the girl working the cashier removed the inventory control devices and checked inside both suitcases to make sure they hadn't been packed with stolen goods and everything. Then she ran into the shirt with no price tag. I attempted to enter into negotiations with her concerning the shirt, but TJ Maxx does not allow employees at her level to take that kind of initiative, and I have to admit that it looks to me like they're right about that one, so she called someone over to take the shirt for a price check.
And then we waited. We waited for about twenty minutes, while the line grew behind me and she told me all about her broken nail and her desire to get off work and go home, and I contemplated suggesting that perhaps, just so those other people would not kill me, she should close out my ticket and take another customer, but then the shirt came back, and we finished up and I packed my shirts inside my suitcase, which I put inside my bigger suitcase, so that the whole assemblage could be wheeled out of the store. The total seemed a touch low to me, but I thought maybe I'd missed a markdown on the shirts. It wasn't until later that I looked at my receipt and realized that she never charged me for the smaller suitcase.
Said suitcase should have cost $60, so if TJ's has a profit margin of 10%, they will have to generate an extra $600 of revenue to make up for this. TJ's is a local company. Who knows how their bottom line affects state, as well as federal, tax revenues, which pay for vital public services. Never mind the sales tax I should have paid on the $60 purchase. Every single person who shops at TJ's will pay for this in increased prices intended to compensate for inventory losses. So in effect, because the store was closing, and because I simply could not bring myself to go another round with the Apathy Girl at the register, my friends and family, and a host of total strangers will be buying me this suitcase for the rest of the month, and probably going without little smidges of education and road repair to boot.
Thank you all very much. It is a very nice suitcase, and I look forward to taking it to Germany.
The pedantic among you will have noticed a peculiar disjoint in the paragraph above, between the singular and the plural.
Yeah, so, since we were in TJ's anyway,
danceboy and I thought we'd look at stuff - shirts and cookwear and so on. We found me some nice shirts, one of which had no price tag. I brought everything I intended to buy to the register, including two suitcases. The suitcases were the first things I put on the counter to ring up. They had to go up one at a time, but they did both go there, and the girl working the cashier removed the inventory control devices and checked inside both suitcases to make sure they hadn't been packed with stolen goods and everything. Then she ran into the shirt with no price tag. I attempted to enter into negotiations with her concerning the shirt, but TJ Maxx does not allow employees at her level to take that kind of initiative, and I have to admit that it looks to me like they're right about that one, so she called someone over to take the shirt for a price check.
And then we waited. We waited for about twenty minutes, while the line grew behind me and she told me all about her broken nail and her desire to get off work and go home, and I contemplated suggesting that perhaps, just so those other people would not kill me, she should close out my ticket and take another customer, but then the shirt came back, and we finished up and I packed my shirts inside my suitcase, which I put inside my bigger suitcase, so that the whole assemblage could be wheeled out of the store. The total seemed a touch low to me, but I thought maybe I'd missed a markdown on the shirts. It wasn't until later that I looked at my receipt and realized that she never charged me for the smaller suitcase.
Said suitcase should have cost $60, so if TJ's has a profit margin of 10%, they will have to generate an extra $600 of revenue to make up for this. TJ's is a local company. Who knows how their bottom line affects state, as well as federal, tax revenues, which pay for vital public services. Never mind the sales tax I should have paid on the $60 purchase. Every single person who shops at TJ's will pay for this in increased prices intended to compensate for inventory losses. So in effect, because the store was closing, and because I simply could not bring myself to go another round with the Apathy Girl at the register, my friends and family, and a host of total strangers will be buying me this suitcase for the rest of the month, and probably going without little smidges of education and road repair to boot.
Thank you all very much. It is a very nice suitcase, and I look forward to taking it to Germany.
