Shady Business

Ah, ok so I didn't blog yesterday. Ya, I'm already over it. Are you? Good, then let's move on.

So, right before I sat down to write this, I was still procrastinating on writing today's blog, instead I was going to go sew something on my sewing machine. Well, as I was pulling the machine out of the box (yes, I keep it stored in it's original box because I can't keep it out all of the time), I remembered the slightly shady story of how I got my sewing machine and suddenly I decided this would be a great blog, so here we go.

The story of how I got my sewing machine goes back several years. Over the past six years I have worked at a toy store off and on (ie. I have not worked there for an entire year straight, I always quit and go back and quit again, and go back again... I have a roller coaster relationship with that job.) Anyway, I think it was during my second year of working there, which would be about 4 years ago now, right after Christmas, the company decided to do a major mark-down on hundreds of video games. They sent us a list of at least 150 titles that were going to be marked down to $5. The crazy thing is that some of those titles were still selling for $50 at other stores, so this was going to be a HUGE sale! Well, the we had large quantities of most of the games that were being marked down, so our managers were not opposed to some of us employees buying some of the games for ourselves.

Now, here I am going to admit something I did that is probably the most outright dishonest thing I have ever done as far as taking advantage of a store and their 'return' policies. See, at that time, the PSP (portable playstation) was still brand new and I really wanted one, but I could not afford it. So I had this idea. What if I bought a few of these games at $5, and take them over to that "neighborhood superstore" (you all know the one I'm talking about) and return them for store credit? These games were worth $30-50 each at that "other" store. I figured, I could invest some money into these games, redeem them for store credit at that "other" store, and use the credit to buy myself a PSP.

So, that's what I did. Sort of. I invested about $80 into the $5 games. I returned most of them for store credit at the superstore and got nearly $400 in store credit. Some of the games, it turned out were not sold there, so I had to sell them on ebay, but that was alright because they ended up selling for more than $50! I don't remember exactly how much money I ended up with after all that, but still, most of it was in store credits. So, I had the store credits, and the money from the ebay sales, but then my plan altered. Since I worked at a toy store, I saw that nearly all of the PSP's we had sold were being returned. It turns out, those units break very easily. So my desire to buy one waned, and here I was, stuck with nearly $400 in store credit which I had intended to use to buy a PSP. So instead, I just bought whatever. School supplies, clothes, a hair straightener, a blow dryer, and I figured, why not buy a sewing machine too? I wanted one, and I had the "money". So I bought one.

That's how I got the sewing machine in the first place. Now my story could end there, but it doesn't. I had that sewing machine for about a year, when suddenly, it stopped working. Something was wrong with the tension on it and I know enough about sewing machines to know that it would cost more to have it repaired than the machine was actually worth, so it just sat there in it's box for almost a year. One day, my mom needed to borrow my sewing machine and I told her how it was broken. My aunt was there during this conversation and she asked where I had bought the machine. I told her where I got it, and she told me to just take it back. I still had the original box and everything. I told her I didn't feel comfortable doing that, so she put it in her car, drove to the closest "superstore" and told them that she had this sewing machine that didn't work anymore and she wanted another one. Well, apparently that's good enough for them. They gave her a brand new one! She brought it back to my house, and so I still have a sewing machine that I never 'really' paid for.

Now just in the interest of full disclosure, I want to tell you why I don't feel so guilty about returning those video games to that store. One of the ladies that I worked with at the Toy Store had a son who was a manager at the local "superstore". She knew full well what I was doing and she got in on it too. She told her son about it, and he rolled his eyes and said she could get away with returning "a few". So I didn't feel so bad, because one of the managers there "knew" what we Toy Store employees were up to. Anyway, that's my blog for today. Goodbye till tomorrow. :-)