Wednesday, 10/30

They’re still doing that sale, huh?

I noticed over the weekend that a local furniture store is continuing their long tradition of doing a “Homemaker Sale”, the central premise of which is that female homemakers need to spend money on new furniture before their husbands take all of that money and spend it on deer hunting. I don’t know exactly when or how this sale started, but it has always struck me as, well, weird, and that’s just not because I’m a guy who doesn’t deer hunt.

It just doesn’t seem right.

I mean, setting aside the fact that the premise of the sale is that the “man” is the hunter and the “woman” is the homemaker (in my little world, at least, those roles are often reversed), there just seems to be something strange about the central relationship dynamic that this sale is hoping to exploit. Are there actually couples out there in which one member, when they have extra money for things like hunting and/or new furniture, will try to spend the money either without the knowledge of their spouse or before their spouse gets to spend it on whatever they want? I know that I never buy anything big (especially furniture or a hunting camp) without first discussing it in depth with Loraine, and I would never certainly try to buy something before Loraine tried to buy something else, just to get it first.

That’s not what a real relationship is like, is it? Or am I just living in some sort of bizarre otherworld where people in a relationship actually respect each other? When I see something based on a premise like this sale, I kinda hafta wonder. I know I’m not a “normal” kind of guy, but I would be saddened to think that there are guys, that there are couples out there like that.

Now I know the concept behind the sale is merely fun; that the furniture store is just trying to move a few extra sofa-sleepers, and the fact that they keep doing it must mean that it’s been successful for them. So maybe I’m over-reacting. It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened, after all. But every time I see a TV spot or print ad for this particular sale, those are the thoughts that run through my head.

Well, that, and the thought that I need to stop watching TV and reading newspapers for a while, especially when one ad seems to have this effect on me.

(jim@wmqt.com)