In days where hardly a month seems to go by without someone posting a blog about an episode of incredibly poor customer service from a company — unmistakable rudeness from a company representative, treating a customer as if they don’t have two brain cells to rub together, you know the kind — it seems kind of piddling to blog about a loss of a couple of hundred dollars. Still, I am not a rich woman by any stretch of the imagination, and neither are many…
In case you missed it, Amazon.com now has a 50 Shades of Grey-themed sub-store in its “sexual wellness” products. I’m not entirely sure how to take this; on the one hand, I think it shows the progress the kink community has made that Amazon is willing to make such a sub-store, complete with its own promotional images, for something that’s still considered deeply taboo by so many Americans. On the other hand, for another resurgence of kink in popular culture to be tied to a work…
Calling Off Auction, Borders to Liquidate (New York Times) When Borders came to Toledo a few years ago I kind of made a point of not going there. Their arrival caused Toledo’s largest and best independent bookstore, Thackeray’s Books, a favourite haunt of my family’s, to close up shop. It didn’t help that Borders moved into Franklin Park Mall (I refuse to call it by its new name), which rapidly went downhill this past decade, gathering all sorts of undesirable characters. When Southwyck Mall closed…
[For those of you who don’t follow my Twitter or Facebook, Mom’s been in the emergency room twice in the past forty-eight hours, first for a slipped disc and painful kidney stone and urinary tract infection, then again because the antibiotic they gave her for her UTI caused her heart to palpitate. She appears to be doing better now, but I’m taking nothing for granted at this point, and needless to say this has me kind of rattled. Not that losing Mom would ever be…
Dear retail store manager: Hello. My name is Sean Shannon. Although you probably don’t know me personally, if you have a retail store in the Toledo area, chances are I’ve shopped in your store. (Unless you manage a Wal*Mart, in which case I will never ever ever set foot in your store, you union-busting, community-destroying, worker-neglecting, discriminatory pieces of crap.) I like to comparison shop so I get the best value for my money, so throughout the course of a year I visit dozens upon dozens…