The Entire World was Shopping

Today, I ventured out with my 2 boys to get Christmas gifts for their mother/my wife, and also pick up a few things we needed for around the house. As today is December 13th, I quickly discovered this was a GIANT mistake.

Our first stop was Barnes & Noble. There were approximately 4 million people at Barnes and Noble. Maybe I'm exaggerating by 1 or 2 million, but there was a lot of people there. Luckily, we were able to find our way through the crowds and get our gifts there in just under an hour. Had that been the end of it, life would have been good.

Next, we had to go to Target to get 1 or 2 more gifts, but mostly to get some household essentials. There were roughly 47 million people at Target...I'm only exaggerating a little there. We got our items within 20-30 minutes, but couldn't find an electric pencil sharpener. We needed one for our home school room. I waited for 5 minutes to ask an employee, and then he walked away from me without offering any help...my blood pressure was elevated at this point! The kids had been pretty good, so I agreed to let them look at toys...I'm a stupid, stupid man. Of the 47 million people at Target, 32 million were in the toy section, so it was extremely difficult to keep track of the kids, because of course, they had to look at different aisles. Each time they switched aisles, I would have to negotiate 75 carts to find them again. By now, my blood pressure was way up. We checked out, which luckily went really quickly and proceeded to Staples to get the electric pencil sharpener.

On the way to Staples, there was a stalled vehicle, which was backing traffic up on one of the main roads through town. So it took twice as long to get to Staples as it should have. Once we got there, I was relieved that there were only 10 people in the store...not exaggerating at all on that. We quickly found our pencil sharpener with the gracious help of a store employee and were done with our shopping. Phew...glad that's over.

I mostly wrote this to whine, but I suppose I should somehow wrap this up. Next year, I'm doing all my shopping online...or at Staples.