Tightly Wound

I Hate Toys R Us

I do. And yesterday's lunchtime foray only reinforced this attitude.

See, The Boy will turn 5 tomorrow. We had the birthday party/family gathering thing last Saturday, but he'll receive his mom and dad gifts on the actual day of his birth. And all was well, except for the fact that I had yet to procure any Moon Sand, the miraculous re-usable sandlike product that has mesmerized The Boy, and that I'm sure he will spend exactly 2 minutes playing with before consigning it to the scrapheap of "huh, that's not quite what I expected."

But that's neither here nor there. The Boy had asked for exactly two items for his birthday--a Power Cranky and Moon Sand--and by God, he was gonna get a Power Cranky and some Moon Sand. Dammit.

Mom had given him the Power Cranky, and Hublet and I had gotten him a new bike, which just left the Moon Sand. I didn't want to order the $30 TV version of the product, because again, he will probably only play with this stuff for 5 minutes, so I hit the Internets to see if I could find a place to buy a smaller amount of the sand.

After visiting about 430 sites which said that yes, they carried Moon Sand, but that they were currently out of it until next February because of the high demand, I found myself hitting the Toys R Us site, where lo and behold, they claimed to carry Moon Sand. Since I didn't want to pay for rush shipping, I realized with a fair amount of dread that I would have to go to the actual store.

And so I girded my loins and headed to the local Toys R Us, where I proceeded to spend 15 minutes wandering around trying to find a person who could direct me to the Moon Sand, then another 5 minutes trying to explain to the employee what Moon Sand was, then another 5 minutes just WALKING from one part of the store to the other, then another 10 minutes scrutinizing the shelves I had been directed to for the Moon Sand, and then, after giving up, noticing the product on the shelves I was passing on my way out of the store. I had forgotten the cardinal rule of the Toys R Us--you are ALWAYS better off wandering aimlessly through the store than asking for help.

So, yay! Moon Sand! Now I just had to PAY for it. Oh, dear God. There were two lines open, during lunchtime, at a busy Toys R Us. One line was also the Customer Service line, so that was out, because nothing takes longer at Toys R Us than customer service. So I went to the second line, where I was "helped" by a girl who was either a) coming down off of a prolonged meth binge, or b) in the middle of said binge. Seriously. She greeted me with, "It's so HOT in here!" tried to scan the barcode on my Moon Sand with a stapler before she figured it out, and then entered the amount of cash tendered before her brain caught up with her fingers, which led to a very disjointed exchange about cost and change, followed by crazed giggling. Then she put the sand in a bag. Sort of. Actually she put it near the bag, on top of the bag, and then kind of wrapped the bag around it, because clearly OPENING the bag was proving too much for her limited motor skills, at which point I just snatched the bag, the sand, and the receipt and fled the store.

I wish I could say that this Toys R Us experience was atypical for me, but alas, it really wasn't.

And this Moon Sand had better live up to the hype. I'm just sayin'.

Posted by Big Arm Woman at August 29, 2006 09:03 AM