How things are wrapped!

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

How things are wrapped!

Including packaging have sure changed. When we had our toy store, a blister package was a thin sheet of plastic over the item, and you would pull it apart as easily as peeling a banana.

Today, not so. It's just about the hardest chore on my schedule these days. However, I have a wonderful friend...Virginia, who lives right next door to me. One day she walked over with a present for me....a good pair of scissors made for slicing into todays's blister pack.

When she brought it over, I thought I would never have occasion to use it.

Well...this gift returned me from insanity to being very functional.

My old cell phone wouldn't hold a charge....so I made a new purchase of an upgraded one. Not only was the phone in rigid heavy-duty plastic....but the battery also came locked in a blister of it's own.

I wonder if the manufactures over in China giggled as they constructed these...............saying those stupid Americans will be cursing over this.

Anyway, back to Virginia and her magic shears.....cut right through all those heavy layers...and finally after cutting this way and that way.....hooray, I was able to retrieve my purchase.

Now....all I have to do is study the instructions. Help Virginia!!!!!!! And while I was struggling to open this...Jeff and Donna were on Skype with me...watching...and I don't want them to know how weak I am.

They were exchanging the $300. that they had entered into my old phone and putting that amount into my new cell.

Now I have to wait for someone to call me! I gotta use up some of that money!

My happy years

My happy years

Dreams and our toy store!

Most of our customers took advantage of our hide away your lay a way!  Either they didn't have room to store the toys...or they had nosy children.

Either way it was a lot of work for us...but it paid the bills.  Our customers would gather in a pile all the toys they wanted to buy.  I would squat on the floor with our Gordon Toys tablet and write every single item.   Sometimes I stayed in that position for half an hour...and I was really able to get right up.

When I think about that posture today...it's hard to believe.

Anyway, Allen would drag their toys down to our basement and store them till Christmas eve...which I learned was Xmas noon.  Sometimes a customer would call and ask us to remove an item because it was advertised at a discount store cheaper.  Big stores like Kmart would use toys as a lost leader..and would sell it cheaper than we were able to buy it from our distributor.

Every year we did this at no extra charge to our customer...and what really bothered me then..and still does...about 12 people would not pick up their toys.

I don't know if they forgot...bought them someplace else...moved away...had a broken marriage...but we didn't want the children to have broken hearts.  I would try phoning them but often the phone was disconnected.   Then I would get on our phone and call everyone on our list who needed a special item that was hard to get...and they would fly down and thank us profusely!  One Christmas at midnight our phone rang and the voice said she forgot to pick up her toys...so my husband got out of bed and greeted her at our store.  Where else would you find service like this???

One woman came in with her son and let him collect a big pile of everything he wanted.  She told me she'd be in the next day with a down payment.  We never saw her again.   We didn't mind putting all the toys back...but what we did mind...her child's broken heart.  We carried everything...and our motto was WE THINK SMALL! 

Frequently our phone would ring and the voice on the other end would start the conversation with...I've looked everywhere..and I can't find it....do you have a certain item.  This hurts ... I would answer that it just walked out the door with a customer.  I would her her sigh..and then she'd ask how much it went for.   Well, I learned that if you have a hard-to-get toy that you can't get, you can be very reasonable...so I would give her an unbelievable figure...   I was  always able to hear the gasp on the other end.   See I have a mean side too.

We also catered Christmas parties for different organizions American Legion, V.F.W. Lion's Club, churches and steel mills and PTA fun fairs.
I made up thousands of grab bags for those and put in magnets, rings, erasers, rulers, jacks, key chains, pens...and about 300 more different items.

Every year we would go to a toy show in a different state and the sales rep would tell us how much each manufacturer planned to  spend on advertising a particular item..so we would stock up heavily on his guidelines.

At Christmas Time we found THEY LIED!

Anyway as time went by, toys became more expensive and sophisticated!  I never did learn to master Rubik's Cute.   We had Simon Sez on display at our checkout....and all day I would see the lights and hear the beeps and that was our first electronic toy!

I dream about our store very often....and I guess the Disney melody is true....A DREAM IS A WISH YOUR HEART MAKES!

Is Life Better Now...I know it's easier

Our ancestors would not even recognize the world as we know it today.   Reading...writing...arithmetic....these don't exist much today.

Lots of our reading time is spent watching real television reality shows or DVD's and not the underwear.

Writing is becoming a shorthanded way with texting...and numbers are all done with calculators ......bringing everything to its exact lowest common denominator.   But I'm not knocking it...thank God for the calculator...I was never good in math...couldn't get the concept of numbers.   Now I know that everything in life has math in it...including the longevity of our lives.  

But life is beautiful and I do appreciate it all...especially having Jeff and Donna moving here so that we could be close.   Those are my good times.   My friends, of which I had many, have disappeared one by one, in numerous ways.

When my husband Allen was alive, we considered taking a drive in our car a good time and stopping for an ice cream cone on the way home...or going window shopping.

When we smiled at people...they smiled back...and it was a good feeling.

Today our inward alert system is ever vigilant watching for suspected terrorists.   Big Brother is always watching.   I don't even watch local news any more since most of it is based on murders.

I'll never be able to understand why a human being wants to take another one's life....or for that matter, have so little disregard for their own life that they're a human bombs.

Our political world in our United States is topsy turvey.   One of our front runners is an imbecile...and the other has lied to us.

But, after all, who hasn't told a lie to make something sound better.   I've even told friends that I enjoyed their cooking when I wanted to gag.    Being kind is everything.

I've wondered if I met someone just like me....would I even want to be friends with me.

Food for thought.

I do enjoy the world today with all its updates and robots...and I wonder what's coming next.