Better by Bike?

Ice yesterday morning prevented me from enjoying my usual ride down to the papershop (what can I say, I’m a wimp and my front teeth were very expensively straightened by my parents so I like to keep them intact) but we made up for it in the afternoon by both cycling down to one of Bigtown’s big box electronics shops to do a little light laptop shopping. I’d meant to go down on Monday but it was just too bloody nice and I spent the afternoon gardening instead but yesterday the ground was frozen and I decided that if there was at least a bike ride thrown in I could handle the strain.*

Now, I would love this to be one of those posts where I prove that cyclists contribute just as much to the economy as car drivers but sad to say we were mainly going down to the big box shop to try out the laptop we’d chosen prior to actually ordering the thing on Amazon. There’s a lot of things you can find out about a laptop online but you can’t find out if it’s got an annoyingly clicky keyboard or an over-sensitive pad that mistakes you reaching for the shift key for you wanting it to highlight acres of carefully crafted prose and then overwriting it in an instant. It’s also hard to tell whether that nice shiny thing in the picture actually translates into something sleek and strokeable or whether you’re going to end up with something that looks like it was designed by a barrel full of drunk monkeys who’d spent too long watching Strictly Come Dancing. I’d never do such a thing to a small independent retailer and I don’t exactly feel that good about doing it to a big one, even if it is one who employs all the monkeys that were rejected from the inebriated laptop design squad on the grounds of taste and decency. I do feel sorry for them though. It must be soul destroying working for a retailer whose business model is fundamentally broken, like realising you’ve signed up for a carriage-building apprenticeship in around 1907, but I simply can’t bring myself to spend £300 more on an identical model laptop just because they’ve employed someone to ‘help’ me do so, especially when by ‘help’ I mean ‘get all the facts wrong and try and sell me an extended warranty’ so we go on with our keyboard testing and stroking while fending off the sales staff and then we pedalled home.

It struck me on the ride back (I have plenty of time to think while the other half disappears over the horizon ahead of me) that we’ll be sorry when the big box is gone and we’ll have to put up with whatever the drunk monkey design teams throw at us. There’s got to be a role somewhere for a showroom for expensive items like laptops where the physical object still counts as much as the specification (see also, trousers). Maybe staffed with actual helpful knowledgeable people who aren’t hampered by the need to flog a useless insurance policy to make up for the fact that the internet has stolen their employer’s business. And maybe (C*met take note) with actual bike racks outside it rather than acres of car parking space.

Oh all right, I’m fantasising now.

*Am I the only female on the planet who considers ‘retail therapy’ to be ‘therapy needed to recover from an afternoon spent shopping’?