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Warehousing Joy: A Retail Therapy That Works
Mostly, I hate to shop. I cook well enough that buying ingredients is sometimes a pleasure, but retail therapy doesn’t work on me. There’s only one kind of store where I consistently leave calmer than when I arrived, and that’s a home-improvement warehouse.
Many household chores produce only ephemeral improvement. Doing laundry and dishes never ends. With toddlers underfoot, as soon as you finish vacuuming or mopping, you might as well start again. By contrast, even minor home-improvement projects can deliver lasting satisfaction. Like many women, I’m no expert in naming all the doodads which make up a proper, manly workshop, but I’m still mechanically inclined and pretty handy with tools. A trip to a home-improvement warehouse promises long-term solutions to household problems. The warehouses also smell good — the lumber especially, though even the weird chemical smells in the lawn care section smell comfortingly of problem-solving. The warehouses’ high ceilings mean the background music is actually in the background for a change, and plenty of products on offer are pleasantly unclad: you see the items themselves, rather than a jarring welter of flashy packaging. These stores are peaceful places.
At least for me. My husband finds them frustrating. They can be frustrating. It’s frustrating to discover that of the zillions of couplings in stock, the one you need isn’t. It’s frustrating when items you think would naturally go together aren’t (though less frustrating if you’re willing to ask for directions). It’s frustrating when you need customer service and it takes a mysteriously long time. I chalk all this up to shopping being frustrating. Still, the frustrations of shopping bug me less at a home-improvement warehouse. Heck, the frustrations of life bug me less there.
Yesterday, for example, was a maddening day. Our toddler defeated not only the magnetic locks on some crucial cabinets but also our toddler gate latches — all of them. Nothing of value was safe in our home anymore, including him. We have flip locks high up on the doors to our place, but flip locks can’t be set on your way out the door, and without working toddler gates, mere minutes’ delay in the at-home parent’s setting them is all our toddler needs to undo all the other locks and run outside, possibly naked, into the street. Defeated cabinet latches are just a nightmare. Defeated toddler gates are an emergency.
Fortunately, both problems were easy to solve. The magnetic locks just needed firmer shimming than the cardboard we had on hand when I first installed them, and our toddler gates needed combination locks and chains. How best to arrange lock and chain took some thought, but not much. I’d like to say these very simple, minor improvements went off without a hitch, but of course, they didn’t. I brought home dinner from our Home Depot’s hot dog stand as a treat, and it turned out to be not enough dinner. Plus, my husband found the numbers on the locks I bought infuriatingly hard to read. An evening of chaos ensued, where, between my cooking dinner number two and finishing the shimming, our toddler hid all our drill bits but three. My husband and I aren’t fighters, but we came close. Fortunately, exchanging the locks for more legible ones gave me an excuse to get out of the house one last time, and… Peace…
I drove to our Home Depot during a nighttime squall in a hot car, uncomfortably pregnant, waited in line entirely too long to return my items, and I still found the journey a peaceful one. Perhaps the peace came from knowing that, at the end of it, I’d have a small but urgent problem lastingly solved.
Since I put the combination locks on the far side of the gates, our toddler can’t get at the locks well enough to fiddle with them. If he could, he would, and all we’d be doing is teaching our kid to crack combinations before he’d even learned to talk. The combination can be reset, but my bet is he’ll figure out how to unscrew the screw keeping the chain from slipping before he gets to the lock. Unscrewing was how he defeated the gates before, when he was still too short to reach the latches: he just unscrewed whatever he could reach until the gates gave. The ergonomic extensions on the nuts the gates came with made it easy for him. Even plain old nuts only temporarily stymied him, but so far he hasn’t defeated nuts secured with glue. I figure if he does learn to unscrew the screw, I’m ready for him.
In life — or my life at least — most problems can’t be solved, only managed. Problem-solving is fun, management is not. Shopping for home improvement strikes me as the most problem-solving form of shopping, which might be why it brings me joy. @bryangstephens asked yesterday, “What if we all focused on giving and receiving Joy?” I couldn’t swear that home-improvement warehouses bring others here joy, but I suspect they do.
In general, I don’t recommend retail therapy. There’s ample reason to avoid taking joy in shopping. But even those of us who generally don’t like shopping have our little weaknesses. One of mine is the lumber aisles. I haven’t had occasion to buy much lumber myself, but pushing a cart down one of those aisles, whether I need anything there or not, wins my vote for most restful experience in the retail world.
What about you? Are you a home-improvement fan? Or is there something else that, when you have to buy it, brings you joy?
Published in General
We had a pressure relief valve go out. I decided to fix the plumbing so that we wouldn’t have to turn the water off if it happened again, so I thought about it, and bought a couple of unions, ball valves, some T’s and elbows, then decided it would take me 3 or 4 hours to do the work, so we called a plumber. He measured one time, put everything together on the garage floor in about a half hour, stuck it in (it fit), and charged me $300.
When I know the name of exactly what I need, I’ve used pre-order and pickup. For many odd parts, though, I don’t know the exact size and shape I want before using those fitting boards to see what goes together, or just handling the stuff (as I had to do to find the cheapest chain I wanted to use). Oddly enough, since pickup and customer service are often the same desk, wait time can be unpredictable. Sometimes it’s really fast. Other times, there’ll be just one customer ahead of you who’s apparently in customer-service hell, where their problem can’t be sorted until managers from several departments come over. I would be mortified to be That Customer, and I think most people would be. I don’t think anyone wakes up in the morning thinking, “Today I shall find an under-staffed customer-service desk and spend a half hour on my query.”
Hoist? There’s a hoist in that picture?
I think there are a few. Some are just more subtle than others.
For obvious reasons I like shopping at home improvement warehouses. As long as it’s not the orange one.
I guess we are (somewhat) lucky. Our local Lowe’s now has a separate desk for pickup. (I assume that means that more folks in our area are using the online ordering.) It does move a little more quickly than the Customer Service desk.
Its not entirely clear from the picture, but it appears to be some kind of I4; it is not likely that this particular engine contains rockers, and the cam cover is not visible either. But if someone wants to have an indepth conversation on the exhaust manifold, and whether or not it is OEM is another story.
Yeah, the exhaust manifold.
The bountiful, heaving exhaust manifold.
Where my husband grew up on the prairie, they had a saying, “She has nice lungs.”
Looks at the size of the vehicle this motor is supposedly going in. You are correct that this motor is not of sufficient size to be going into a truck. I think this is photoshopped and I took the liberty of assume a V8 is what one puts in an truck heading for off road use. Even if it had OHC’s they still can call that cover rocker cover (value cover, or cam cover, we grease moneys are a lazy with vocabulary). Rocker covers just played better here
#Ryansplaing
Spelling, too.
Thanks, Skip.
Way to ruin the joke, cat-pain obvious.
Still annoying Arahant
#winning
Joke?
Haha wrong thread.
I could use that for digging up small trees and bushes. :-) I’d be testing the tensile strength of the roots I didn’t cut. :-)