"Hi Jimi...It's been a while"....kronk

"Hey Joe! Where you going with that gun in your hand?"...From the song, "Hey Joe" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience...

One of the department stores is closing it's doors after many years in the area and I've been hunting diligently for some kind of bargain. Tough work, really, since all the prices got "jacked-up" so the 20 to 50 percent discount can still be profitable for the dying store.

Wandering through what was left of the sporting goods section, I was sorely tempted by the silicone dive mask and snorkel set. Nice color, but I saw the same set at a competitor store for a dollar less.

After meandering for more than an hour, my buggy was still empty and I had pretty much come to the conclusion that there WERE no bargains to be had. Nothing much left in Gardening; a few bags of ant poison and three, four-hundred dollar lawn mowers. (real value of the mowers was approximately three-hundred dollars) Moving right along...

I'd pretty much wrote-off the music department as bargainless. Music lovers will watch these store-closing sales with keen interest and by the time the discount gets to ten percent, there's usually nothing left but the soundtrack to "Gone with the Wind" and maybe three or four copies of "Greatest Hits by various (and not necessarily the original) artists. I already had those....Hmmmmmm?

Oh, why not? From what I could see, this wouldn't take long at all. Talk about barren! The cd racks had "For Sale" signs on 'em. Not even a cassette in a foreign language. Sheesh...Quite a few "As Is" items were piled-up in a corner towards the back, battered boom-boxes and scratched-to-death vcrs, mostly. Your basic pile of over-priced, un-warrantable, you might-get-lucky...electonic junk.

What's this? That unit there! The one with the missing "eject button" and the bullet-hole in the starboard speaker..There's something in the cd player. I had to pry the door open to get at the disk. Oh my!

"Sir. Oh Sir."

'Yes. May I help you?'

"This disk, is it for sale?"

'Why yes, of course it's for sale. Everything in the store is for sale.'

I'm sure that the fellow noticed the tremor in my voice. I hardly dared to hope.

"How much?"

He took the disk from me and examined it carefully. 'Well, there's no case and I've never heard of this Hendrix fellow before. How about one dollar?"

I could hardly contain my joy. "Is that before or after the forty percent discount?"

He took a piece of clear tape from the roll in his pocket, stuck it on the label side of the disk and wrote $1.00. 'That's one dollar, before the discount, Sir. You're price is sixty cents plus tax."

I payed the man and left the store a happy shopper. It had taken me thirteen man-hours since the store-closing announcement, but finally, four weeks later...at forty percent off and dangerously close to the end game, I'd found my bargain.



"There's a red house over yonder?...That's where my baby stays."...From the song, "Red House" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

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