The Dark Crumplezone

Life in a small city, for the specialty consumer, almost by definition, is an exercise in frustration. You are almost always guaranteed to have your finely tuned preferences habitually compromised by your community's inability to support them.

Say, for example, you're the kind of person who likes to buy a lot of... Oh, I don't know... toys. I don't mean sex toys or anything like that. I mean the same kind of toys that are resignedly dispensed, out oif a sense of obligation, by adults to those less fortunate. Namely, their children.

Here in Kelowna, the toy connoisseur has astonishingly few options to explore. You got your Wal-Mart, and you got your Toys'R'Us, and that's it. Oh sure, there's that one super geek shop, full of inflated prices and ancient japanese properties that no one remembers or cares about. But that place doesn't count.

So when I'm scouring the city on a toy hunting expedition, I'm actually spending about a collective one and one half minutes looking in Kelowna's toy sections. Rediculous!

Still, it remains difficult to not get excited beforehand about all the possibilities. But, as in so many of life's arenas, dissapointment is the only reward for my anticipation. It's kind of like having Christmas every week instead of once every 52 weeks.

So when a rarefied straw of hope is extended to me, unwisely, I will clutch at it until all hope is wrung out of it and, bent and ruined beneath my weight, I slide of off the end into the pits of despair and chaos.

Case in point. Every year, as Hanukkah draws nigh, more and more second rate department stores try their hand at luring you in with promises of delectable toy selections. Why, just a few weeks ago, as I perused my local free newspaper, what should I find inside but a flyer from Zellers, exclusively advertising Toys, Toys, Toys!

Zellers, as every true Canadian knows, is a dingy, miscreant department store that no one can ever take pride in shopping at. It is a shopping experience specifically designed to make you feel poor and alone in the world.

What's more is that Zellers touy department typically consists of a few dusty, undisturbed aisles in a corner forgotten by time. Stray cats come here to die in peace, and the only time Zellers staff enter the toy department is to attatch $4.99 price tags to their dessicated corpses.

My worst personal experience with Zellers occured in the days of my youth. As I recall, I discovered that what I thought was a rather realistic ventriloquism dummy, was in fact an 89 year old woman who'd died there of a heart attack some three days earlier. It is perhaps, no suprise, that my mother did not enjoy my demonstration of my ventriloquism skills.

Even though the old lady was reasonably priced at $5.99, my mother was still reasonably upset. Which may well be the only reasonable reaction she ever had. She told me to wait right there and left me alone with the cadaver.

Mother went to customer service to complain about the dead woman in the toy section. I cannot say how the staff there reacted, but soon after she left me, I heard ringing out over the store's paging system words that, judging by the thick layer of dust, had never been heard in the history of the store;
"Clean up in aisle 23."

The janitor was on the scene with remarkable speed. His swift arrival and shortness of breath I took as signs of his true professionalism. He quickly correct me and explained he had merely been exercing by the barbie dolls one aisle over.

Anyway, the incident was resolved to the satisfaction of all parties involved. We got to go up to the manager's office, from whom I swiped a cigarette while Mom signed some papers. Then we went home with a brand new, free, hot plate, and a goldfish who unfortunately died before we left the parking lot. But the promise of Beefaroni for dinner, warm for once, staved off any tears.

But all that is neither here nor there for my purposes here today. As I was saying before, Zellers was going on and on in their advertisment about all their wonderful prices on all their wonderful selections of toys.

Naturally, I regarded such claims with a healthy amount of skepticism. As I flippantly flipped page after page, I was soon confronted by large letters unabashedly proclaiming " ALL TRANSFORMERS 25% OFF!"

Unfortunately for Yours Truly, as devotees will have already surmised, this captured my particular fancy. The promise of robots in disguise is too much for me to resist. So I had to see it for myself.

Perhaps the only real suprise is the disappointment I let myself experience as I gazed apon the pathetic smattering of toys. There were six actual Transformers toys on the shelf. Three of them were "Cybertron Defense Red Alert", two were "Mudflap", and one was "Dark Crumplezone". All toys I had no interest in and could have easily purchased months ago if I'd been so inclined. So I've nothing left to say. Except this:

Fuck you, Zellers. You have no secrets left. I see the truth of what you are and I shall not be deceived by you again. You are Canada's retail Auschwitz. Go to Hell.