The lengthening day

It is an annual occurrence and yet it is truly one of the most miraculous sights I have beheld -- the gradual onset of spring. The skies begin to unlock their colour-chests and frolic in pastels of hazy purple and chocks of dulcet orange. The twilight moment stretches every advancing day into March and that extra few seconds of daylight afforded at the margin of the evening are quite easily the most liberating.

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The Wal-Mart experience

Last evening, after the regular meal at India Sweets and Spices, Tejaswi and I headed over to Wal-Mart -- Tejaswi to look for dishwasher cleaning fluid and I to look for bean bag chairs. Much as I cherished my reluctance to add furniture, a bean bag chair seemed to me as the only solution for an aching back as I lay on the floor with my laptop on me. The bean bag chairs over at Amazon seemed like the ones I was eyeing. After completing our purchase of the dishwasher fluid, we headed over to the Furniture section of the store and asked for bean bag chairs. They were stocked at the very top of the racks in cardboard cartons. They came in all sizes and shapes of footballs, basketballs and baseballs. A helpful Wal-Mart employee came over, positioned a ladder and fished out the first bean bag he could reach. It was the football flavour and it was rather comfortable and precisely what I imagined. Although a price of $18.77 was mentioned at the side, neither the Wal-Mart employee nor I had noticed it and so we headed over to one of the price-scan booths. That was when the Wal-Mart effect kicked in. To our pleasant surprise, the bean bag was marked down to a paltry $5. A huge mass of PVC pellets and styrofoam -- as the remarkable Wikipedia tells me -- modeled into the shape of a brown football and all it cost was $5. Now, it is quite possible this had nothing to do with Wal-Mart's retailing mojo but it is not for nothing that people like Rick Kuhlman should depend so heavily on Wal-Mart and its sister agencies when they need to start pinching pennies (I will not be too surprised to see a cheap paperback from Mr. Kuhlman in the near future stocked to the brim on Wal-Mart racks). Amidst great controversy, litigation, much trade union angst Wal-Mart continues to thrive, flourish, dictate conventional tastes and preferences and finally even influence corporate boardroom strategies. This has to be the ultimate triumph (vindication?) for free markets and consumerism. Tejaswi and I both walked away with bean bag chairs for $5.41-a-piece including tax, pleased as punch with our bargains.

Wal-Mart

Beanbags.com

Amazon's polystyrene beanbag

Wikipedia: Bean bag

Extreme saver: Rick Kuhlman

Wal-Mart class action suit for sexual discrimination

Wal-Mart vs. Supermarket unions

What's behind the Procter deal? Wal-Mart

April 2004

January 2004 - March 2004

October 2003 - January 2004

July 2003 - October 2003