Toys R Not Us
Well, maybe toys R us, but Toys R Us is not us, or not me, and I decided this weekend that you can't make me go there ever again.
It was hot and the girl was sickish and we couldn't go to the beach, so we decided to make a field trip to the far suburbs and do some birthday reconnaissance and get some doo-dads to raise everyone's spirits. But once there and wandering the aisles I decided that TRU is just not going to work for me. I swear I'm not a "little and funky and inefficient is always better" person (often yes, but not always) but the monolithic brandedness and characterness (even a small pack of pencils is so encrusted with Disney princesses there could be anything in there: lipsticks, glue, vibrators...) and the unrelenting sameness just sucks the joy right out of toys for me. I have two little kids and get so much pleasure out of procuring cool stuff for them that I have a blog dedicated to the project and yet I go in there and I just don't even want to buy anything. That can't be right.
But the prices, it has to be worth it for the prices, right? Eh. I have the sales slip here and compared most of what we got and it's exactly the same on Amazon, so here's the new plan: if it's mass market and we know what it is and have determined the kids should have one, we order it. If we think it would be fun to go look at toys and maybe buy a few trinkets to brighten a dull Saturday afternoon, we go the local/independent/inefficient route, not that there's anything particularly inefficient about an independent toy store. Maybe there's no parking lot the size of North Dakota, baking in the South Bay sun, but that's a plus in my book. We park on the street, or we take the train.
I never thought it would take the pursuit of a PlayMobile fireman set and a plastic tiara to finally turn me into a hippie, but you never do see these things coming. And I still love Target, and hippies don't shop at Target, right?
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