Anybody remember an old, slightly blue, joke about Mickey Mouse divorcing Minnie?
Judge: You can’t divorce her just because you think she’s crazy!
Mickey: (best delivered in a Mickey falsetto) I didn’t say she was crazy, what I said is she’s fuckin’ Goofy!
And so it was on my little odyssey to Linen ‘n’ Things today. If I really cared, I should write a letter to corporate, but I’d rather vent right here.
About a week ago, my Henckels kitchen shears went missing. I searched everywhere and came to the conclusion that if I’d looked everywhere they could possibly be, then they weren’t lost. Logically, that worked, nut when there were bags of birdseed to open, it didn’t cut it.
I use the shears nearly every day and things needing cutting were beginning to accumulate. Did I say how precision these shears are? You can cut Saran Wrap just by sliding them along, a perfect straight line. I’d used other shears before these were recommended highly and haven’t looked back.
So I take some time off today and drive over Linen ‘n” Things, a special trip. They had them, locked up with the high-dollar knives, but there was no price on them anywhere. I found two clerks, a guy and a gal, flirting with each other in a nearby aisle and interrupted them to announce that I wanted to buy the Henckels shears in the locked cabinet. Guy unlocks bottom cabinet and looks for knives still in packages, none there, but several minutes pass for him to reach this conclusion. I tell him I’ll take the display shears, if that’s all they have, but he has to run back to chick so she can call another store and see if they have them. More minutes pass.
Chick comes back, no, that’s the last pair. I’ll take them! Chick goes away again, mission accomplished. Guy unlocks top cabinet where the shears are, but also discovers another pair with the knife set in a butcher block. He calls chick back. They put their heads together. The pair up there on the magnetic holder might be part of a set. So I ask them, where’s the set it belongs to, because there are only two sets on display and they both have shears in them. He pulls out the shears and I think I’m almost home, but then he has doubts again and tells me he better ask the manager. He leaves, and more minutes pass.
He comes back and announces that he can’t sell them because they might be part of a set. I challenge him to show me the set with the missing shears, because the manager never came out to take a look. I’m upset, so I tell him that’s only natural to assume that items on display are for sale in a store, and if the shears aren’t for sale, maybe they should take them off the display so they don’t have to put themselves and another customer through this nonsense the next time it happens. He apologizes about how terrible it is, but leaves the shears in there, locked up in the display.
I drive across the street to William Sonoma and buy the same shears there, a bottle of hand soap, and a beautiful Microplane grater.
What I wished I’d said is this: “If you don’t want to sell the items you have on display, I’d suggest you throw out all the kitchen and bath shit and stock the shelves with spiral ring bound anthologies of employee written poetry instead.” These morons wasted a half hour of my time and didn’t even address their own problem that caused it. If you’re into shorting a company’s stock based on personal impressions, these are the kind of impressions that will have you seeing dollar signs.
Update: Forgetting all that for a moment, there is a philosophical angle on the elusive shears. Why do stores exist? I know there is a grand history, going back to the dawn of civilization, where people traded what they had for that they didn’t have. A few specialized in these transactions and set up primitive trading posts where nothing was produced but a wide variety of “things” temporarily resided as fungible materials. Time marches on. Collective centers of trading posts flourished and became known as “cities.” Entropy sets in. Trading posts move away from cities into “shopping centers” where the exchange of goods and proxies for them becomes secondary to the entertainment value of “being” in the commercial depot. A hierarchy develops amongst the “shoppers,” but also amongst the merchant cells populating the shopping center. Prestige becomes as important as commercial and personal savvy between all the players in this scheme. As the intents of the participants mutate, so does the root purpose. My experience at Linen ‘N’ Things is not an outlier. It is a natural consequence in the evolution of commercial enterprises. Whereas their initial purpose was to form a hub for exchanges, their raison d’être has slowly morphed into a social structure whose sole purpose is to sustain itself. I shouldn’t be surprised that a “store” does not want to sell its goods. Instead, I should marvel at the inherent serenity demonstrated by the glacial flow of history, and count myself extremely fortunate to have been there perhaps at the precise moment the tipping point was reached, one as historically significant as the very first exchange of this for that.
I chase the bright elusive butterfly of chaos and sing the body electric. If you want to buy something, do it online.
I was wrong to criticize Linen ‘N’ Things, I realize now. I was wrong to assume they existed just to sell me things. They have a greater purpose, to provide a social and hierarchal infrastructure where people can go to see and be seen. The rules I mistakenly violated by attempting to purchase the shears in the display are existentially more important than myself or any of the other players in this melodrama, more important than the clerk, his girlfriend, even more important than the manager who, like all arbitrary figures of authority, existed offstage. The rules exist to be enforced and we exist solely to enforce and obey them. The rules say what we can and cannot do and we are their subordinates.
9:37:50 PM 
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