Have you tried buying any nice furniture lately? The process works like this.
1. Go to furniture store.
2. Pick out a chair
3. Learn it will take six months to deliver
4. Wait nine months
5. Chair is delivered.
6. It’s broken
7. Return chair
8. Discover chair is no longer being produced
9. Scream profanities
10. Repeat
I have been through this cycle several times. I believe there is one furniture store for the entire country, somewhere in South Carolina, where all they do is ship broken furniture, wait for it to be returned then ship it to someone else. It’s a low margin business, but they make it up in volume.
Presumably, the only time a furniture sale becomes final is when the customer happens to be a blind guy with no friends. And he’s not likely to make any friends if every guest he has over to the house gets a spring-loaded colonoscopy, courtesy of the couch.
Sometimes the furniture store will send out a guy with a clipboard, a screwdriver, and a brown marker pen to fix the broken furniture. These furniture fixers have cheery dispositions and can-do attitudes. They hope that’s enough to convince you to accept broken merchandise. That meeting goes like this:
Furniture Guy: “There. I used my brown marker pen and it’s as good as new.”
Me: “The table only has three #$&%$ legs!”
Furniture Guy: “Well, I have one other solution, but it’s controversial.”
Me: “What’s that?”
Furniture Guy: “Try masturbating until you go blind.”
Me: “Thanks for your help. Say, have you tried my new couch?”