lap land

When my daughter and I got new laptops a few years ago, my wife got stuck with our daughter's old computer. The keyboard doesn't work, so she has a desktop keyboard plugged into a USB port. The battery has no life left, so she has to keep it plugged in to the wall. Sometimes it overheats and shuts itself off right in the middle of whatever she's doing. Fortunately, an article in USA Today tipped us off that Walmart was putting a limited number of laptops on sale for $298 on Sunday morning.



Walmart was like a ghost town at 8:00 a.m. on Sunday. At least the one in West Knoxville was. Meanwhile my wife was waiting in line at a different Walmart in Northern Virginia. Each person was given a ticket to show their place in line. My wife was the eleventh person there. The advertisement said each store would have a minimum of ten laptops. Fortunately that store had about 60 laptops available. If they had run out, I was on standby to buy one in Tennessee. She paid 5% sales tax instead of the 9.25% I would have paid in Knoxville, a savings of $12.67.



As you can see, the Site to Store display was much nicer in Knoxville. They still had ten computers left when I got there around 8:15. I would have gotten there sooner if I hadn't wasted time looking in the electronics department first. One of the employees told me they started with 21 bargain laptops and had already sold some that morning. They also sold some by mistake at midnight, eight hours too early. Meanwhile in Virginia, the sales clerk asked why my wife was taking pictures. Apparently the answer, "they're for my husband's blog," was perfectly satisfactory.



My wife is pretty happy that she has a new "lappy." She won't get to put her new Compaq Presario CQ60-419WM Notebook PC through its paces until after it has been on the charger overnight.