Department Stores

I went to K Mart today with my cousin and his wife, and it was rather interesting to say the least. This isn't just about K Mart, rather it is about things I have gleaned from department stores all over. First off, let me reveal what I've noticed about such places. There's different levels of department stores.

First off, there's what I call high end stores. These are places like Macy's Sears, and JC Penny's, places that specialize in higher quality goods, mainly clothes and appliances, appliances moreso in Sears' case. Then you have your mid level, more broad stores like Target and Fred Meyer. These have a wider range of products, less focused on clothes and more focus on various other things like consumer electronics, various housewears, and in Fred Meyer's case, groceries. These places are generally pretty cool, but not terribly interesting. I enjoy going to such places to restock my Nerf arsenal, but I don't have any profound experiences there. However, I do find such things at what I call low end department stores.

These are places like Wal-Mart and K Mart and the like. Now they aren't low end because of the products necessarily, though these places don't have the best quality all the time. And it's not because of the selection, as Wal-Mart has done everything it can to sell absolutely everything. It's the feeling you get when you walk in. Wal-Mart isn't just cheap as far as prices go, it just feels cheap in there. There's a lack of energy that makes you want to explore, and I experienced the same thing in K Mart also. In Wal-Mart you get the feeling that you're in a looming, unpleasant place that just doesn't feel right. I don't dislike Wal-Mart solely because they are a potentially harmful corporate giant, that's for a different blog that isn't mine. I dislike it because it feels like a depressing place. Its denizens are numerous, from average folks to the elderly, along with large families and horrendously large people. I may have a followup post to this once I fully explore Wal-Mart.

The K Mart that I went to had a similar feel to it, but it felt barren to me. Not many people were inside, and it felt like it had been abandoned, though it was clearly well stocked. The prices were fair, standard, I did browse through the toy section, but I didn't find any robots to collect aside from an expensive (and awesome) Lego Exo-Force set. Think of it as Lego cashing in on anime, I'll explain some other time. Anyway, the cream of the crop in this K Mart was the snack stand. It's not too terribly unusual to see a concessions area in a store. Target has one, after all. But the snack stand in this particular K Mart felt just as wrong as the rest of the store. It was closed, as it was somewhat late, but it looked dark and empty. The prepackaged nachos and uninviting cases gave the impression that it had been closed for a long time and nobody thought to clean it out, like an old ghost town of an amusement park. Needless to say, even if it was open I probably wouldn't ever want to eat anything that came out of it. I only wish I got a picture of it.

Overall it was an enjoyable experience, and I do believe I need to hit Wal-Mart next. That should yield similar results, but not identical.

Introducing...

My name's Connor Healy. I'm 20 years old, and I live in the grand metropolis of Portland, Oregon. I'm a college student majoring in Japanese and minoring in Asian Studies, though that's not fully concrete yet. I mean, in the first two years, what is? I come from a good family in a good town that's getting better each day. Should be obvious that I'm an optimist by now.

I have a lot of interests, and they are all different. I'm a fan of Japanese animation and comics, put simply as anime and manga respectively, though I enjoy comics and graphic novels of Western origin just as much. I'm a fan of video and computer games as well, but I never go to tournaments or LANs or anything. I'm not devoted enough for that. I play World of Warcraft, but not very much. I like good books, good music, good art, and good films. Right now I'm actually watching Lord of War with my cousins and cousin in law. I like good food as well, and I'm big on finding good restaurants in whatever area I'm in.

The name of this blog is Robot Collector, because that's one of my hobbies. I collect robots. I like them, I like how they look, I enjoy the idea of a living machine, and they just seem cool. I'm not a regular collector, though. I don't leave it on a shelf in a perfect box, leaving it to collect dust and be nothing more than a knick-nack on the mantle. No, I bust that thing out of the box and play with it. I collected all 4 robots in the MARS toy line, and they're the best. These dandy little toys were picked up at the Walgreens near my home for about 6 dollars each, and although they were cheap, they aren't built cheap. None of them have broken at all, and the batteries on one of them have worn out simply because of good use. The robots can walk if you turn on a switch on the back of one of their shoulders or by holding down a button on their chest. The robots each come with three guns, able to hold one and mount the other two on pegs above the shoulders. The nice thing is that they all have at least one or two guns that the others don't have. They all have different arms, too, well 3 of the 4 do. One has a drill arm, two have a multi-barreled cannon/missile launcher arm, and one has a gripping claw with a button to push to make it grab things. The drill hand one is probably my favorite, and I bought two of them. They have different color schemes, different enough to seem like different toys. One's blue and one's dark green. Anyway, these are solid, and I really love 'em. I should get more.
This here is why the blog's name is Robot Collector: It's who I am and what I do.

But the blog isn't limited to robots and toy shopping at Walgreens. It's everything that I find, see, buy, or do. It's not a Livejournal or anything like that. This blog is about me and everything in my world. This is more than an update, it's all sorts of things. The only thing that it really is for certain is a blog. What you're reading, what I'm typing, what's displayed on this page is a part of me that's being put out to experiment with on the web. It's an exploration and a journey. But it's nothing complex, not a big memoir, or a politically charged rant page. At this point, it's a blog that I'm writing, and that's all that I can tell you now.