bizarreville

Retailers across Bizarreville were high-fiving each other after what they viewed as a successful Black Friday shop-athon.  More shoppers than expected had flocked to the malls, creating that rich tradition of constipated parking lots, bumper-car shopping & shoving excursions, and of course the endless lines.  Many retailers adopted the new Black Friday tradition of minimizing sales staffing on that Friday so that checkout lines were especially long, creating the impression of huge crowds inside their store to any passers-by.  It all seemed to work, as crowds were near record-level.  Missing from their wild exuberence was one minor detail:  no one was spending much money.

Particularly hit by the shop/no-buy paradox was Eldberd’s House of Flatscreens.  Old Eldy has been in the TV business for 50 years, expanding bit by bit.  But recently he decided to go “All In” in the growing Flatscreen market and built a showroom the size of a football field – boasting 1000 Flatscreens of every permutation of size, pixel, Hertzage, techno-nonsense, and plasmology.  Even found some metric screen sizes for European wannabe’s.

Eldy opened his doors at 3am, with typical ads for 30% off one obscure model:  a 3700 millimeter, paisley-colored, 82 Hertz Bullshmitz LCD television, but only carried 2 total units in stock.  Naturally those were snarfed up quickly.  Many other disgruntled customers were surprised to find all his other models were at full or nearly full price…causing considerable grumbling and grouching as they were still wiping sleep from their eyes and wondering why in the  f*@!  did they set the alarm and wake up for “this”?  Nevertheless, they roamed the great Hall of Same to marvel at the units upon units, with few actually plunking down ten C-notes to garner one of these trinkets.  One woman approached a beleaguered sales associate with the question, “Which one would you recommend?”  The sales person was restrained from throttling her by several onlooking customers.

Someone forgot to tell Eldberd that this ain’t your father’s TV business anymore.  Eldy still remembers the day when the only new feature on the next year’s model TV was a slightly different color on the vinyl fake-woodgrain overlay.  They forgot to tell Eldy that his vast array of Flatscreen inventory would all be obsolete in less than 9 months…replaced with all-new models with obsolesence-creating zinkrofaddles and dorkuloids.  Poor Eldy doesn’t even know what a fankerfloyd does…tsk, tsk.