On Saturday I joined Randy and two of his friends (Sandy and Ben) to go furniture shopping. Randy is on the hunt for a new dining room set so we ventured out to the Greater Gardner (MA) Furniture Outlets. For some reason, there are a bunch of furniture shops dotting the retail landscape of this rather depressed area of the state. It reminded me a lot of Texas (strip malls, rundown houses, fast food restaurants) but with rolling hills and old mill buildings. In fact, most of the furniture stores seemed to be in former mills or factories (one shop was 80,000 square feet).<\/p>\n
The stores aren’t much to right home about. I would guess that 75% of the furniture was utter crap. I saw patterns on reclining chairs that I thought (no, prayed) would have disappeared in the 70’s. Horrific vomit colored (and patterened) sofas surprised us around every corner. And then there were the knick-knacks. A fake cherry cheesecake here, an 18-inch round\u00a0brown, green and orange ceramic flower bud there, a glass sheep (or penguin) over there. Who buys this stuff?<\/p>\n
It was quite the experience. In Templeton, though, Randy did find a rather fine table that he’s considering buying so I guess the trip wasn’t a complete loss. Besides, the four of us had a blast mocking the furniture…and we shared a lovely meal in one of Gardner’s finer restaurants: KFC. Yes, Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was either that or a frankfurter place called Hot-Diggity-Dog.<\/p>\n
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On Saturday I joined Randy and two of his friends (Sandy and Ben) to go furniture shopping. Randy is on the hunt for a new dining room set so we ventured out to the Greater Gardner (MA) Furniture Outlets. For some reason, there are a bunch of furniture shops dotting the retail landscape of this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}