My office includes a 24-hour operation, so the manager decided it might be fun to let the associates wrap their holiday gifts there, sparing the nearly impossible task of sending the kids off with the family while one clears home space to play Santa. As an administrative assistant, I was one of the assigned coordinators for the event: in other words, I get to do the buying.
My first stop was the Five Below on Black Friday, which I covered previously. Upon checking my receipt, I realized there was a problem: The first attempt at ringing up my strange basket full of purchases brought the total to way higher than I had bought, so the checker worked with me to re-ring up the purchases. That meant struggling with the endless roles of wrapping paper, tissue paper and tape and bows, taking them out of those ubiquitous plastic bags. She said she had to do some of the purchases over, but did not re-ring the gift boxes. In fact, she left them off altogether. This means that I, being honest, must go back to get them redone.
Strike one for a good brick-n-mortar shopping experience.
My next stop was Dollar Tree (or, as a three-year-old I heard say once, “Dowah Twee”). It does have twee items. It also offered a folding knife in a gift box. I think that belongs in a Cabela’s, but that’s just me. The lines met in the corner of one vertical and one horizontal aisle. That was partly my fault, because I should have pulled the cart behind the man in the vertical aisle, but a family of four was in the connecting aisle, so I pulled up, and the other customers obediently pulled in behind me.
It turned out okay: everybody got the equal opportunity to part with their income in order.
A dozen more rolls of wrapping paper, tags, more boxes, more ribbon and a couple of solar dancing toys for me later, I realized that I had not learned my lesson about those unwieldy rolls. Dollar Tree uses shopping carts with a pole at a height which restricts its use to inside the store as it won’t fit through the door jamb. The ring-up was correct, but I was now stuck with six of those re-labeled versions of the ineffective little plastic bags trying to contain oversized, rather fragile sticks of lightweight wands in the wind that I needed to gather up and take outside and across a crowded parking lot. It was a struggle, but I got them into the car and then home, and I found a nice, long bag I had saved from Boscov’s in which to stow my purchases until I get them to the office.
I worry about the next trip. Where should I go? Do they have big shopping bags, or should I go with wrapping paper by the pre-folded packs? Not to mention that we will need scissors. Or maybe I should get a folding knife.
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