One of the things that I hate about brick and mortar retail is the way the one thing that should make it worth the higher cost is the thing that makes it inferior to online sales. Sales staff should be well informed, helpful, and have the people skills required to know how to deal with customers. I no longer deal with sale people when buying electronics because they are rarely helpful and usually annoying. Even buying a car usually means I know more than the salesman when it comes to the model I'm interested in. So given the choice of dealing with idiot salepaople or buying online and saving a few bucks, buying online is an obvious choice.



ETA: I didn't mean that as a knock against sales people. The point I never got around to making is that is stores want to stay in business they need to invest in the one thing they can offer that online can't. Knowledgeable, friendly, helpful staff. People you will enjoy your shopping experience with.

Truth that. But often it is worse. They aren't just uninformed or misinformed but told to lie to the costumer. The only computer store I even bother walking into is actually not a computer store but a repair center. They sell parts but only stock ones that they know are good and are willing to put a to give a parts and labor warranty on.

Book stores can go that way too. I've not returned to one bookstore sense a "helpful" clerk say I had a Lord of the Rings and Hobbit 4 book box set and "suggested" Harry Potter.

I dislike Barns and Noble. They have driven all the little bookstores into the ground. They tend to be a bit more pretentious than I like, and they have started removing seating from inside the store. I must admit though, it is a bookstore, and I could spend hours there.

The coat for my sister's wedding arrived from Milanoo yesterday.

Apparently, their idea of a 2XL is what we Americans would label a Large. The thing was a size too small even though I had seen warnings elsewhere that their sizes run small and adjusted my order up one size to try to compensate. Oh, and when I contacted them to request an exchange for the next larger size, they said they were out of that size but would refund my money. So now I have to find my coat somewhere else and wait for a slow boat to China to return my coat to get my $80 back.

I hate that. I had the same problem when I got some shirts in Ireland. I got some XLs and they came down to about an inch above my belt. I tried the 2XL... it was twice as wide, looked like a tent, and was still too short.

Hey I was listening to a podcast not to long ago about such things.

My rule is never to buy anything from China (or Hong Kong or Taiwan) that I'm at all concerned about. Anything that I have to have at a certain time will not be ordered from China. If I am 99% certain that the item they are selling is right, and it's something I'm ordering as a stock sales item, I will work under the assumption that ~20% of them will be in acceptable condition upon arrival. If the price doesn't justify it at that failure rate, I won't buy.

I still lose out from time to time with those rules, but much less often.

Awesome pre-4th barbecue yesterday.

Massive hangover today... not so awesome.

while installing baffles in the attic, a lighting fixture in the hallway was knocked loose. Luckily, it's not too heavy and very unlikely to fall, but it will need to be repaired when the attic work completed before putting in more insulation (which would only get in the way of repairs).

Man, why can't we measure shirts the way we do pants? Length x width, in inches (or centimeters, for you metric types), and to hell with all these arbitrary sizes like 'large' or 'extra large'. Thirty inches is thirty inches is 76.2 centimeters, no matter where you're from.