Shopping in the Dark

After the snow cleared a bit on Saturday morning, I headed with my friend Tony to Fry's to pick up a blu-ray rom. When we walked in the door we immediately noticed something was off. With the exception of the cafe, media section & appliances, the rest of the store was running on emergency lighting. Instead of turning customers away, the employees were raiding the flashlight aisle and talking on their cell phones hanging out and chatting in groups trying their best to keep the store running. Thanks to Rob, I always have a flashlight with me. Granted it wasn't a 600 lumen light like he would have had but, nonetheless, I had light.

Tony got to overhear an interesting explanation by one of Fry's highly technically inclined agents who explained that the partial power outage was because the building was built on a county line and half of the power came from one company and the other half from another. I thought Tony was going to fall down laughing.

In another story we overheard, a couple employees were talking about someone who had grabbed a handful of mice and escaped out an emergency exit door. They were responsible of making sure no more valuable merchandise made an early escape from the darkly lit area. Now, I'm guessing that two 19yr old 120lb guys weren't going to stop many hardened criminals. If nothing else, it was worth a good chuckle.... I still can't believe an idiot stole mice. That's like going to a jewelry store and robbing them of cubic zirconium.

Regardless, I was able to pick up my drive and I hopped in a rather long checkout line. From what I could tell, every free employee was at the checkout and they all had manual packets and pads for non-POS hell. That's about where the sanity ended. Despite the cash registers not working, the lane indicator lights were working... huh? It gets weirder. They also had a few manual credit card machines that were also fully functional. So here was the checkout process: (1) a sales slip was completed and signed, (2) a credit card imprint slip was prepared [remember those?] and it was signed, then (3) the associate swiped my credit card and had me sign the thermal slip. I guess there's no question I made that purchase. I'm just waiting for it to show up as three separate charges in my credit card statement. Good times.

Fry's In The Dark