This year we plan to cook Xmas dinner on the BBQ. This is ambitious on several counts. 1. We have never cooked Xmas dinner on a BBQ. 2. We do not currently own a BBQ.
We are remedying the second issue tomorrow but BBQ purchasing has been fraught with difficulties.
Plan A was to get one from a friend of a friend who knew someone who worked at a BBQ manufacturers. Took us a while to reliase that mates rates was actually more than retail.
Plan B We consider adoption - Trade Me. We actually discussed going to Matamata to pick one up. Grim.
Plan C Harvey Normans one day only massive BBQ extravaganza on a Wednesday. We manage to escape from work at lunchtime. Apparently extravaganza is a 5% discount.
We are begining to lose faith.
Plan D. Placemakers send us an advertisement.
25% off to all cardholders. Must be a super megahyperextravaganza we thought. Wednesday only. After the Harvey Norman experiance this should have been a hint. Only available at Westgate, Kumeu and Helensville. We work in the CBD about 30 minutes away in no traffic. Again, this should have been a hint.
We do our research. We look on the Internet. We narrow it down to two models. We decide to go out at lunchtime - the theory being that if we leave it til after work they might sell out. That and travelling the length of the NW motorway in rush hour traffic can not be good for the blood pressure.
The Blonde and I arrive at Westgate Placemakers almost bang on 12. We enter. We look for bbqs. We scour the aisles. We scratch our heads in a confused manner. We cannot find the bbqs. We scratch some more. We scour some more. We find the bbqs.
I don't think my expectations are too high here. If you had specifically mailed out a promotion purely on bbqs out to your card holders with a one day only offer you would think you might stock up. Even just a bit. There were 11 models in the catalogue. There were 3 in the store.
At first we thought we were wrong. We looked for a helpful staff member. We found a staff member, I will not go so far as to say helpful. We were right, there were only 3. The ones we were interested in weren't here. Full stop. We were more than welcome to have any BBQ we wanted as long as it any of these three. The Blonde started to simmer. The staff member looked at us blankly. The Blonde started to boil. Either the staff member had strong preservation instincts or he took our look of slack jawed amazement to mean we had no further need of his services and he departed. I'd like to say skedaddled but it was more of a purposeless lope.
Now, I had figured that maybe if we went to another big placemakers with the full range of bbqs we could perhaps decide what we wanted and phoned through an order to Westgate to take advantage of the deal. This idea was met with some resistance. The Blonde was not spending a single cent of his hard earned cash here EVER AGAIN. I could see his point. I removed him from the store before toys were thrown.
Plan D2 Kumeu Placemakers. I suggested we phone ahead to see if they had the models required. This did not happen. Kumeu is 15 minutes down the road, in the opposite direction from work. It is not good when you work in town and your lunchbreak is officially over and you are driving away from work past livestock and vineyards. Kumeu had 2 models. 1 of them was the same as Westgate. This was not going well. We admitted defeat and returned to the CBD. We talked about a lot of things. We did not talk about bbqs.
There was no way this adventure was going to end just yet. On returning to the office the Blonde dealt with this issue the new fashioned way. Dealing with people in real time is so last century. He wrote a very eloquent letter of complaint to the store manager.
Long story shortish we have a BBQ arriving tomorrow, an effusive apology from the very nice and slightly embarrased store manager and the Blonde is able to go back and spend his hard earned cash with a clear conscience.
And they all lived happily ever after.
Or they will if they can assemble it.
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