Note to self: NEVER plan any social event here without scheduling a visit from the maids right beforehand.
Anyway, curiousmay9 and I went to Sears last night and bought our new stove! It will be delivered and installed tomorrow.
It’s another electric, but it’s got a sealed top which makes it much easier to clean. It also has a huge oven, five burners, and other nice features. AND—the oven is self-cleaning!
We’ll get a gas stove with a convection oven when we do the kitchen renovation. For now, this is a major improvement over the one we had.
I got to actually touch a Roomba for the first time while we were there. They didn’t have them running, unfortunately. They did have two different models, though. The more expensive one scoots itself back to its charging base when it needs juice. Important safety feature: the “cliff sensor” keeps it from falling down the stairs.
It also has a remote control, which caused me to think, “Ooo! A new way to torment the critters!”
I want one for each floor, but I’ll be very tickled with one, period.
The Sears employees had the most lackadaisical attitudes I have ever encountered in people selling big-ticket items. Perhaps they don’t get commissions? I had to hunt down a salesperson—TWICE! The first wandered away and didn’t return!
When I found the second one (chatting with salesperson #3), I said, “Excuse me, we want to buy a stove.”
She stood there looking at me with all the placid lack of interest seen in a cow chewing her cud.
“Now,” I added. “We want to buy a stove right now. If somebody will come take our money.”
She gave her counterpart a rather exasperated, look, and moseyed on towards curiousmay9 resignedly.
It should not take 20 minutes to ring up the sale of anything in a retail environment. Really. There were no choices to make. We knew which model of stove we were buying. We knew that we didn’t want the “extended warranty.” We knew that we needed a 3‑prong cord. All in all, we knew what we needed. The woman was just astonishingly incompetent.
I did wonder, later, if the lack of interest in us was due to the fact that there were two women, with no man presumably holding the purse strings to actually buy something.
