Teddy Bears on Aisle 3

Years ago, my family had an inside joke when we visited one of our local supermarket chains. This was well before there were Target or Walmart superstores that combined groceries with discount department stores. If the store was selling toys or TVs or anything beyond the usual run of grocery items, we knew the chain was in trouble because they were trying to pad their margins with crap they had picked up somewhere at a discount. "Teddy bears on Aisle 3," we would say. Uh-oh. That chain did end up being absorbed by another and later liquidated.

I thought of that today when I was at Turn Style, one of our local clothing consignment chain stores, looking for some reused winterization wear to cope with our early-onset damp-and-drearies. Their checkout counter is a long glass box that's usually full of jewelry and watches, and it still had some of that, but this time half of it was full of CBD oils (!) and this:


(My apologies for the glare spots... it's a glass case with lights right above it.)

It's a bit hard to make out in my photo, but those are point-of-purchase displays full of mysterious items. Black boxes with varying size shapes and plastic thingies. What are they? The display panels in back are not just ugly and badly designed from an aesthetic standpoint, they're hard to read and don't explain what the product is or does in any useful way.

For background, you need to know that Minnesota recently passed a "hands-free" cellphone law, meaning you're no longer supposed to touch your phone while driving. So we suddenly have a bunch of cheap crap like this that allows you to mount your phone to a magnet that fits into your car's air vents. Then you can continue on your merry way, driving while not paying attention to the road as long as you don't touch the phone.

Or at least that's what I figured out from googling the words "car air vent phone holder" after I got home. Seems to me a photo like this or a diagram similar to it might have gotten the idea across a lot more easily:


Either way, seeing these things (plus the CBD oils) in the case made me fear for Turn Style's future. And both the presence of these products and their terrible design definitely degraded the retail experience of shopping there, second-hand store though it may be.

It's not worth it, Turn Style. You're losing at Merchandising 101.