Containers.

Thursday I met up with my good friend Kim from high school to wander around a mall for a few hours as a pretext for catching up. Just as it did back in junior high and high school, browsing around window shopping, in this case searching noncommittally for possible after-Christmas deals, is a perfect setting for having an hours-long conversation that ranges over all the various news that sums up "life in the past year."

We did have a couple of items each to check off the list. Mine was new lingerie and a light wool sweater to replace one I put a hole in recently. Hers was shelving and racks for a kitchen cabinet, so we stopped into a Container Store that shared a parking lot with the mall.

There is a certain ironic tension about the Container Store and me. On the one hand, it is just the sort of store that I should never enter alone, because: Ooh! Bento boxes! Ooh! Pot-lid racks! Ooh! Melamine trays! They're so black and so rectangular and so plastic!

On the other hand, on the face of it, the store is absurd. There used to be a SNL skit, one of the fake commercials, that advertised a bank that only made change. Sometimes I think that 20 years ago, SNL could have made a parody commercial of the Container Store: We don't sell stuff. We sell stuff to put your stuff in. We even sell stuff to put the stuff that you put your stuff in in. There are echoes of the famous George Carlin bit, "My stuff is stuff, your stuff is s#it."

But anyway, I was walking up and down the aisles with Kim, nattering on about this tray and that box, and checking out prices and saying things like "the thing you are looking for goes inside a cabinet, so you won't want to pay extra for something just because it looks good," and "oh, I have a bunch of these, they are really great because they stack," and "don't just look in the kitchen section, my one friend uses fridge ice-maker bins to hold school supplies in her bookshelves."

We had stopped to scrutinize some sorters for racking flat things like cookie sheets and cutting boards in a cabinet and I was going on about "well, I have a metal one kind of like this, but it isn't as well made as this one, mine doesn't have the ends of the wires welded and so they get bent all the time, but look, this plastic one is less expensive, and if it isn't big enough to keep them straight you could always get a second one and put it deeper back in the cabinet," when a sales clerk came down off a ladder and tried to recruit me for a job due to my superior product knowledge.

(No way, I told her, but not before I asked to find out what the employee discount was. For the record, it is 40 percent).

Comments

[Delores]

you seriously need a "like" button for your posts. :)

*like*

[bearing]

Thank you. It was a fun trip.