Elayne Riggs' Journal (for Leah)

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Silly Site o' the Day

So I'm trying to decide if I should do anything special here tomorrow for my fifth blogiversary. Maybe just a blogaround to catch me up on things, if I don't get that done today. My backache is easing up a bit, but never fast enough for my liking. Still, I'm managing the stiffness without having to resort to painkillers, and my physical therapy session is tonight so that should help, as should a quiet weekend (Robin's working so my big plans so far consist of taking the car in for its quarterly oil change).

Meanwhile, what the heck was going on in the local Staples parking lot yesterday? I went to take in my dry cleaning in the same strip mall, and run across the street to shop at Garden Gourmet whilst Robin browsed the Staples -- but he couldn't even get in the store! Navigating in and out of that strip mall parking lot was a real trip.



(Chalkboard message generator from GlassGiant via Gerard, natch.)

Now, I know it's back to school (I think yesterday was the first school day in NYC), and Staples has all sorts of promotions, but that parking lot and store were jammed to nightmare-level. The weirdest thing, Robin said, was that he estimated about 98% of the store traffic seemed to be non-white. The Kingsbridge section, where the store is located, is a mixed-income and -race area skewing Latino, and Riverdale itself is very predominantly white, so we're used to seeing a fairly racially balanced consumer base there -- but not last night. So I have to wonder what specifically was going on to attract black and Latino folks but not white folks who also have school-aged kids. Can anyone clue me in?

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