“
You have to get up every day and be prepared to move the world around.”
That’s a quote from my mother-in-law. It’s good enough to be put on a coffee mug or a T-shirt, or a tombstone. She was talking about my brother-in-law, the Sig-O’s older brother, who I will call Jack (that’s not his name); and my nephew Jason (not his name either). Jack has a good job with a regional public utility, even though it means he works away from home four days a week and has a three-and-a-half hour commute on Monday mornings and Thursday evenings. Jason, who has got to be about twenty-six or twenty-seven now, is unemployed and living at home. Anne thinks that Jason needs more gumption.
Jason is in the construction trades, which are dormant right now. Right before the housing collapse, Jason got hired on by a successful contractor in the area where they lived. It was Jason’s first permanent job, he moved up quickly, and he was thrilled. He was cocky. He hadn’t seen the bad times so he didn’t know there could be bad times. And now. . . here we are. I imagine him sitting on the couch in his parents’ house, watching Nascar and The Hunting Channel, in all respects the “discouraged worker.”
Anne’s solution is simple and she spelled it out for Jack in short sentences. “You give him a list of things to do around the house. At the end of the week, you check to see if they’re done. If they’re not, you show Jason how to do them. Then they go back on the list.”
Perhaps the President could put Anne on one of his economic commissions.
*
I hate malls. It isn’t a rational response; it’s instinctual. I especially hate malls in December. This is a true story; many years ago I was writing a story about a woman who was an assassin, and I had trouble grasping her motivation, so I went to the big mall in town the week before Christmas and just walked around, getting jostled, bumped and stepped on, flinching from the klaxon-level shrieking of exhausted toddlers, bombarded by the aroma of scented candles, perfumes, and fried grease from the food court, deafened by electronic homogenized Xmas music. I lasted about three hours and I had my character down perfectly.
Anne wanted to go to the old mall at the north end of town, where they have a See’s Candies and a Borders bookstore. Okay, I will brave a mall, even in December, for the promise of chocolate. Borders holds no allure because I have favorite independent bookstores, but they often have new hardcovers at 20% off, or at least they always had, and that was what Anne was interested in. Last year while she and I were at Borders she joined their Preferred Members program (I’m not sure that’s the name). She carries a little discount card that was supposed to get her an additional discount over and above the 20%.
We went to the candy store first and were completely successful in finding what we wanted. There was a bonus because I found a hat for a friend in the shop next door. At 10:10 on Saturday morning the place was bustling—not just the little zoo-themed Christmas train or the See Santa Claus booth, but with people. Carrying bags! Purchasing things! My inner curmudgeon grumbled, but I was happy to see evidence of more consumer confidence. Really. I was.
Then we went to Borders. Anne found the two new releases immediately. On the front of each book a round sticker proclaimed “20% Off!” and some words in a smaller font that I couldn’t see. I looked for a Jacqueline Winspear mystery and couldn’t find it, so I got in line behind Anne, prepared to buy a gift card for her. The line moved quickly and a pleasant young man rang up her books. She pulled out the Preferred Members card. There were two people behind me in line.
“Can you give me your e-mail?” the clerk said.
Anne is hard of hearing so that took a few seconds, and then she said, “I don’t have e-mail.”
“Oh, we have to have an e-mail address to honor these cards,” he said. “You could go to hotmail or gmail and get a free account.”
Yes, Anne needs an e-mail address desperately, to go with her non-existent computer. I said, “Any e-mail address?”
“Yes,” he said, so I gave him one of my junk e-mail addresses.
Happy now, he rang up the purchases. For two books, with a 20% discount, it seemed rather high. Anne wrote the check and made some comment about how expensive books were getting even 20% off.
“Oh, you’re not getting the 20% discount,” he said.
“But it says 20% off.”
“Only Members Plus get the 20% off,” he said. “That costs $20 a year. I’ll be happy to sign you up.”
There were about six people in line behind us now.
“But you’ve always given 20% discount on new releases.”
“You have to belong to Members Plus,” he said.
“What? I have to sign up for another card?”
“In order to get the 20% off, you have to be in Members Plus. It’s only $20 a year. It pays for itself in six months,” he said.
Anne studied her check, looked at the books, and said, “Never mind. Just put the books back.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
I put back the blank gift card I’d been holding.
“I’m sorry that you’re not happy,” he said, quite sincerely. I thought that, given the condition of brick-and-mortar bookstores these days, he should really be sorry that, between the two of us, he’d just lost a seventy-five dollar sale. Would you think that, as a strategy, a bookstore might honor the old discount program “just this once,” to keep a customer? Apparently not.
On the way out I looked closely at the tiny wording on the round sticker and sure enough, it says “For Members+.” Nobody can accuse them of false advertizing.
*
We stopped at the new corporate-organic-food-behemoth’s Death-Star-sized superstore and I got Anne a cup of tea. The place is brightly lit and bustling, well laid out, looking like Trader Joe’s but not quite able to bring off the casual fun of that store. They do have a nice little café area though and we both needed the sit-down. There was a woman next to us, probably in her early thirties, wearing a plush Santa hat. She had a set of colored felt pens and was filling in a coloring book. While we were there, a silver-haired woman wearing a more expensive Santa hat with sequins came up to her and said, “I love your hat.” Then she went out.
The coloring woman looked at us. “She likes my hat.”
“It’s a lovely hat,” I said.
“She had a Santa hat too,” coloring woman said, “But hers was more sparkly.”