this party’s over

i hit the malls today to go toy shopping. i do this about once every two weeks or so. all of portland has been slim pickings of late. i had better luck in the seattle suburban sprawl in one day than i did in portland for the last month.

suncoast and sam goody get some good stuff and have decent prices and good clearance sales, but it’s completely random what they do and don’t get, when it arrives vs other stores, and they never restock anything. worth checking since they’re close to home, but generally unexciting.

gamestop and electronics boutique keep changing their mind about whether to sell toys at all. eb has given up, and you’d think gamestop has too from the way they stock things. the last major shipment they got was the halo 2 figures which sold out in a week and never restocked, and the new wave of movie maniacs which did the exact same thing.

fred meyers has a decent toy department provided all i want is the two top brands in each category, re; barbie, bratz, playskool, lego, megabloks, gijoe, transformers, some star wars, some gundam, some batman, hot wheels, tech deck, and some filler.

target has a much better selection, but restocking the aisles is a mythical event most of the time, and when they do restock, the new stuff sells out instantly, leaving you with more of the same sad pegwarmers as before. i can’t hit them easily or frequently enough to have good luck so it’s kind of a crapshoot whether it’s worth going at all most of the time.

walmart is evil and inconvenient to boot. their toy department is also a joke, which leads one to wonder how, exactly, they’re kicking tru’s ass.

there’s rite aid, but aside from a good stock of chap mei stuff around christmas and the random hella rare figure sitting on the front pegs for weeks at a time since absolutely nobody shops there, they’re completely worthless.

toybliss sometimes has the good stuff, sometimes not, always for 25-50% more. i’d shop online if i was happy paying extra.

my kb is gone, gutted, even the walls torn down to become 1/3 of an old navy, providing hip and sexy clothes to all the kids of america.*

and now, there’s no more tru for me. after finding nothing of interest at suncoast and nothing at all at gamestop, i came around the corner to head into toys r us and found them gutted and battlescarred. there was nothing left. not a single toy that i wanted. just a few sad shelves of the last few pegwarmers and unsold overstock of last years holiday failures, all of it 30-50% off, except video games, which were only 30% off and also competely gone. two weeks ago lloyd center had a healthy and viable tru, or so it seemed. now, nothing.

i could get into a walmart debate at this point, but i don’t feel like it. suffice to say, to answer the question ‘do you punish a company for being too successful?’ is ‘yes, that’s why we have monopoly laws.’

urban planning at work. there would BE a target at lloyd center, and a walmart and a best buy and a home depot too, if we’d let them build big concrete boxes over the top of whatever happened to be in the way.

we don’t, so there aren’t any of those big chain stores here in the heart of the city, and consequently, with the two major chain toy stores(kb and tru) having been run nearly out of business entirely, and entirely out of the city proper, i’m rapidly running short of supply for my copious demand.

this leaves me with freddies and their limited selection, suncoast and sam goody with their unpredictable arrivals, and target with their infrequent restocking.

technically there’s a tru at jantzen and one at clackamas, but while mass transit does go there, that’s the very end of the line for two bus lines, sitting on opposite ends of the city. and tru of late isn’t worth going out of my way for.

this, then, is the heart of my dilemma, which has gotten increasingly worse over the last few years. most of the stuff i want, does hit stores somewhere in town. once or twice. i can find most of it. once, usually.

you do the math. if i don’t buy the stuff i want when i find it, these days, i don’t often get a second chance. it used to be, i knew that the major brands would be restocked at least once at tru, target, fred meyers, AND kb, so i could focus on the non-mainstream stuff and pick up the major brand items basically at any time.

not so anymore.

i know this is a wierd reason to want to move, but i’m a toy geek. if i’m going to have to order most of my stuff off the internet, pay higher prices and pay for shipping, that’s just one more knock in the slow and steady impetus to get the hell out of this city and move to canada or tokyo or london or new zealand.

i love portland, don’t get me wrong. the trees, the rain, the orange glow from thick cloud cover. the good mass transit and urban planning. mcmenamins and the laurelhurst.

but most of my friends emigrated from california. i don’t know anybody FROM here anymore. i don’t really get out into the city except to go toy shopping, so it’s not like i’m attached to anything here except theatre-pubs. and i don’t even drink!

having lived in the middle of nowhere in alaska last summer, i KNOW that i can survive anywhere as long as i have internet access, a post office, a movie theater, and a fred meyers. access to a city, even if infrequent, is good enough. that means i can handle anywhere in the pacific northwest, and the farther north i go, the colder it gets. i like that.

what WAS keeping me here was family, friends, and a city i liked. the city is starting to grate on me, and in a year or so my family here in the city ain’t gonna be much. so it’s friends and the laurelhurst right now. thin ice.

i wouldn’t be surprised if i ended up in washington in a couple years, sales tax be damned. the question is, will i stop there?

*i want an old navy peacoat, but would i wear it? i want their crazy army jacket i saw in seattle as well, and their hooded grey canvas? work jacket. but i don’t live in the right climate. it was 40ish today, i had on a thin fleece, and it was almost too much for me. i need to move somewhere cold.