Random Thread ~Usagi-Chan ☮ Tūsurī~

[rikkikow]

Hardly a problem like those in blizzard conditions but here is how I deal with the water coming off the garage on the property behind my house. I route it to my front yard and street to keep my backyard from flooding.


I had just put four peanuts on the fence for my squirrel buddy and like magic before I knew it there was only three there. Then I caught him taking one more and running off through the neighbors back fence leaving two behind. They are all gone now. I tried getting a picture but it was raining and my phone was getting wet and I could not get the phone code in and the finger print would not take.

[Celedam]

Moving from another thread, because it's off-topic there…

I'd love to visit a store like that. It reminds me of Fry's Electronics back in the '90s, when it was still cool.

The video kinda looks like Michael's to me. I admit they're pretty middlebrow when it comes to art supply stores, but at least they're still in business unlike a lot of other places vanquished by Amazon. There's a branch in Arborland Center but I guess it's not really what you had in mind.

No, it's not. I know about and have been to that Michael's. It's trash.

When I wax nostalgic about Fry's Electronics (as I've done before here), I'm talking about the concept of a store that offers seemingly disparate types of products because they all appeal to a particular type of customer. A store that's just plain fun to browse because you're always finding something you never knew you wanted until it was right in front of you.

Europe and Asia still have stores like that, I think because the population density is so high in those regions. Even if the type of customer you're trying to attract makes up a small fraction of the total population, there are still enough of those customers within traveling distance to make your store a success.

America is different, obviously. The population density is much lower here. Even the big metroplexes on the East and West Coasts are relatively lower density than Europe and Asia, so the suburban Midwest where I live is practically a wasteland. That, combined with the Great Smearing™ over the last thirty years (first the "big box" chains led by Walmart, then online led by Amazon), has forced brick-and-mortar retail to consolidate and appeal to as many people as possible.

I live in a university town, and even here, almost all of the nifty little stores that I enjoyed as a student are gone now. Most of them have been replaced by convenience stores and carry-out restaurants, because that's what today's students want when they walk from home to campus and then back again.

Even the gaming/comic/hobby stores that pop up these days are not really about those things. They're MTG playspaces/outlets that just happen to stock a few other things in order to appear respectable. There are two such stores near me (1, 2), and within a mile of each other, and they both seem to be successful because MTG is hot again. But if you're a gamer or a hobbyist who's not into MTG, you'll be in and out in a few minutes because there's simply nothing else there.

[esm]

Semi-related but when I was growing up in Thailand, I loved going to stationary stores because there would be a lot of cool pens, pencils, notebooks, etc from other countries in Asia (mostly Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). Like I remember these Korean notebooks that were slightly tinted because apparently white was a little too bright, and I’d still change PowerPoint slides to a very light cream color or something instead of leaving it white. Also having a collection of cool pens was pretty much a status symbol at school.

Office supply stores in the US are much more boring.

[Celedam]

^ I recommend JetPens.

You can probably get what you want there, but it's online of course, so you don't get that visceral pleasure of browsing in person. That's what I'm talking about.

[erilaz]

If you ever find yourself in Japan, the seven-story Tokyu Hands "Creative Life Store" in Shibuya is the store to visit. Everything from mailing tubes to the AKB48 Donjara game (okay, probably not that anymore, since I saw that there a decade ago, but you get the idea).

https://trulytokyo.com/tokyu-hands-shibuya/
https://whereintokyo.com/venues/25305.html

[esm]

Yeah I like being able to try out pens if I’m gonna spend good money on them. Art supply stores like Blick Art Materials is good for that, but the stores I grew up going to in Thailand were more like a combo of stationary, book, music, who knows what else stores.

Also malls in Asia >>> malls in the US.

I have to admit I like walking around in Target though. I’ve lived walking distance from one in Chicago, DC, and now here in Atlanta so it’s just habit for me.

[Zunu]

^^^^^ I hear you. Fry's was never big in NYC but we used to have a comparable place called J&R's Music World that sold CDs, computers, cameras, home appliances, children's toys etc. They went out of business voluntarily when they got tired of competing with Amazon and realized that the real estate their buildings owned and occupied was worth hundreds of millions to developers.

Shopping malls on the whole have completely changed since when I was a little kid. Back then every big mall had a bookstore, and electronics hobby store like Radio Shack, an overpriced gadget store like Brookstone, an arts and crafts type store where they would sell yarn and fabric, a store where you could buy music, and maybe even musical instruments like clarinets and pianos, and so on.

Now I live literally in walking distance of three malls. Not a single bookshop or hobbyist/enthusiast store between them except for a GameStop, I guess. Just clothes, sneakers, jewelry, etc. There's Costco,Target, Best Buy, an Apple Store, etc. Like esm just said, they can be fun to browse. But they aren't really the same as how it was back in the day. They're not the kind of store where the staff themselves are people who work there because they too are enthusiasts.

[Celedam]

Fry's was never big in NYC

I should clarify that my nostalgia for Fry's dates back to 1997-1999, when I moved out to Silicon Valley to join my Engineering friends who had all moved out there a couple years earlier. I was the Liberal Arts oddball in our group, but with the DotCom boom happening out there, my friends told me that even I could get rich working with computers. That's how I became a technical writer.

Anyhow, while we were living out there, we had so many different Fry's locations within driving distance that we could actually say "Let's not go to that Fry's, let's go to the good Fry's."

but we used to have a comparable place called J&R's Music World that sold CDs, computers, cameras, home appliances, children's toys etc.

Yeah, that was Fry's. Books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, video game consoles (PlayStation versus Sega Saturn versus Nintendo 64), PCs and Macs (including parts to build your own; Mac clones were still a thing, gamely competing against the first iMac), tools, peripherals, software (back when people bought boxed software off the shelf), pretty much any consumer electronics you could imagine (everyone had a PalmPilot), TVs and stereos, electronic keyboards and drum kits, home appliances, hobbyist electronics, scientific toys, office toys and supplies, RC and model kits, Nerf guns, Lego sets, some prepper/camping equipment, seasonal and novelty gifts…

And then of course snacks by the checkout lanes…

Many disparate types of products, but when collected together under one roof, it appealed to a particular type of customer.

You can get all of that stuff from Amazon now, and Amazon's algorithm tries its best to keep you clicking, but it's just not the same.

Shopping malls on the whole have completely changed since when I was a little kid. Back then every big mall had a bookstore, and electronics hobby store like Radio Shack, an overpriced gadget store like Brookstone, an arts and crafts type store where they would sell yarn and fabric, a store where you could buy music, and maybe even musical instruments like clarinets and pianos, and so on.

Now I live literally in walking distance of three malls. Not a single bookshop or hobbyist/enthusiast store between them except for a GameStop, I guess. Just clothes, sneakers, jewelry, etc. There's Costco,Target, Best Buy, an Apple Store, etc. Like esm just said, they can be fun to browse. But they aren't really the same as how it was back in the day. They're not the kind of store where the staff themselves are people who work there because they too are enthusiasts.

This.

[erilaz]

Now I live literally in walking distance of three malls. Not a single bookshop or hobbyist/enthusiast store between them except for a GameStop, I guess.

That definitely seems to be the norm nowadays, but fortunately the shopping center closest to my apartment (15 minutes on foot) still has a Barnes & Noble. When I went to the malls in my hometown as a kid, I spent the majority of that time in the B. Dalton and Waldenbooks stores. When I was older, I also spent a fair amount of time in the record stores (Licorice Pizza, Sam Goody, Wherehouse).

There's also an Asian mall within easy walking distance of where I live now, with a 99 Ranch Market and various restaurants and shops, including a small Chinese bookstore, which still exists. I used to go there quite often to buy Asian movie DVDs and C-pop and Taiwan edition J-pop CDs. That's where I bought the all-region Taiwanese bootleg DVD of Eizō The Morning Musume｡ Best 10 that turned me from an interested observer into an obsessed fan.

[Zunu]

I remember when I first started getting into jpop, I found a few jpop CDs in Chinatown near where I worked at the time, mixed in with the HK DVDs and VCD comedies I used to collect with actors like Louis Koo and Sandra Ng.

When I worked late hours at the office I would play those jpop CDs with nobody else around. One time a Japanese client came in and I eagerly showed her jewel cases of the CDs I was listening to. She took a look at them and squinted, trying to make out the titles. Eventually I told her it was Aiko or some such and she belatedly nodded. Her initial lack of recognition puzzled me. Weren't all Japanese people experts in Jpop? I felt tragically disillusioned. It was only later that I realized that Japanese CDs for the Chinese export market were (quite reasonably) labeled in Chinese and not easily comprehensible by Japanese people.