Actual Conversation I just had with Furniture Store Employee:
I went into a few furniture stores today to look at bookshelves. I’ve reached the point where I can no longer squeeze all of my books onto the shelves that survived the move– two broke, and I gave away enough books at the time to be okay with that, but now I’ve acquired enough books that I really do need another shelf. So today I went around to start pricing them, just to get an idea what type of investment it might be; I don’t want to buy something else that will break easily.
After pricing bookshelves at a few places, I decided that I needed to find out what a “real” furniture store charges for them so I’d have some basis of comparison. I really prefer to buy “real” things (i.e. real wood) and only need something small to medium-sized.
Walking through the store demonstrated that “leather” sofas just aren’t the quality they once were, and that most furniture all looks the same. When I finally reached the back, they only had two bookshelves for sale, both of them $400 and both of them pressed board with laminant on them.
Do people not read anymore? I guess not. I’ve had a hard time finding shelves everywhere, but no trouble finding TV stands. Le sigh.
As I was running my hand over the shelf (checking quality, which was, as I said, poor), an employee walked up to me and asked if I was finding everything okay. (Why is this the phrase people use? Why not, “Can I help you with anything?”)
Me: Well, I’m looking for bookshelves, but these are laminant and $400. That seems like a lot.
Employee: That’s because those are real wood veneer.
Me: Veneer? So still basically a laminant. And for $400, way overpriced.
She got extremely huffy and walked away without saying another word. No one else asked me how I was finding things the rest of the time I was in the store.
Real wood veneer. *sigh*
Joanna Volavka 
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