Target Shopping

We’ve got an old Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner that is starting to show it’s age. All the tools are cracked and it isn’t picking up stuff well even after a bag change. Plus that sucker is loud, so we went out today to get Donna a nice new fangled bag-less picker upper. Target had a couple in this week’s ad that looked promising.

After the blue law mandated 1:30 PM opening we headed out to Target. Allow me to interject an observation from my cubicle neighbor Jim:

Here in the Bible Belt don’t you find it odd that the blue laws will allow you to go into a grocery store on Sunday morning and buy a 6-pack of beer, but you cannot enter a book store and buy a Bible?

There were three to choose at the $129 price point, a Bissell, a Hoover and a Eureka. I pulled them off the shelf one by one and Donna pushed them around a bit, lifted them and generally got a feel for which one she liked the best. She liked the Hover the best, for a couple reasons, but the auto retractable cord thingie sent it over the top. As a bonus the price tag on the shelf said you got a $20 gift card with it’s purchase.

We had one final request, what did this puppy sound like? We looked all over for an outlet, but couldn’t find one. We corralled a sales team member and asked where we could plug it in. His reply was that he didn’t think they were allowed to do that. We insisted and he called on his walkie talkie to a higher up team member and got the same answer, can’t do it. What’s up with that? I’m sure a legal department team member had something to do with that rule. I was briefly temped to roll the display vacuum over to the TV section and plug it in, but decided to just buy it. If it turned out to be louder than our current unit (highly unlikely) we’d just bring it back.

When we got to the check out it rang up as 129 + tax. No gift card mention. We pointed it out to the cashier team member and she proceeded to thumb through the flyer. In that ad the $20 gift card was shown with a $169 vacuum. We told her that the card on the shelf said this one got a card as well. So she called over a higher up team member, whose response was the gift card automatically shows up, if it doesn’t, no gift card. We asked her to come with us to the shelf and we would show her and her response was, “I can’t leave the front.” Our response was, “Fine, we don’t want this vacuum.” I hit cancel on the credit card thing and we walked away.

Donna said, “Come on, let’s go back and look.” We did and sure enough we hadn’t imagined the $20 Gift Card sign. Trouble was that offer expired 7/7 (yesterday.) Some one had obviously forgotten to remove the promo shelf tag. Fifteen, twenty years ago the retailer would have apologized for the confusion, sold us the vacuum and given us the Gift Card. Now they’d rather just do without the sale and jeopardize future purchases. Sigh.

We came home and I bought the same item from Amazon for $95, no tax and free shipping. Hoover U5507-900