TV Shopping

I spent a good deal of time yesterday afternoon shopping for a new TV. Unfortunately, it was not a TV for me. Rather, my sister asked me if we would help her get a new TV. We went to Best Buy and looked at some of the TVs. Before my sister could really make a decision though, the DIRECTV salesman cornered her, trying for about half an hour to get her to make the switch from Comcast cable to DIRECTV satellite service. Eventually she thought she ditched him and she ended up picking out a TV.

It took a while for them to find the TV in the back of the store, and once she declined to have them calibrate it, they finally got around to ringing up her purchase. However, the price that came up was higher than the price on the TV's price tag. Apparently they had brought out the wrong model. They went back to find the correct model of TV, but the only unit they had in that model was an open box model. They would have given her a ten percent discount on that, but we all thought that for something like a new TV, it would probably be better to get one from a sealed box. They located the model that she wanted at their Maplewood location, so we were going to go there to get it.

It was while they were ringing up the purchase from the other location, that my sister finally got an explanation about the difference between the model she had wanted and the model that they had brought out. From what she was told, she realized that the model that they had brought out was the model she really wanted, so they rang that one up instead.

We had spent about two and a half hours at Best Buy at this point and were about ready to leave with my sister's new TV, but the Minnesota Twins were on the myriad of TVs in the home theater section of the store. There was out remaining in the top of the ninth inning, so we stayed to see if the Twins would win, which they did. It was while we were watching the end of the game that the DIRECTV salesman came back and started putting the pressure back on my sister. She eventually walked away from him without signing up for the service. We then tried to load the TV into our Saturn VUE, however with Emma, Mel, Rebecca, and me in the car, it wouldn't fit. So we ended up taking the TV back inside to have them hold it until we could come back with Mel's truck to take it back to Rebecca's house.

By now it was pretty late, so we headed to Don Pablo's in Roseville for dinner. The food was good, as it usually is, but we did have a couple of problems. First of all, the entrée they brought out for Mel was the wrong one. They did get the correct meal for her eventually, which meant we had an extra meal to bring home as a leftover. The second problem we had was that while Emma and I were in the restroom for what had to be the tenth time since our arrival, our server took away Emma's meal before Mel and Rebecca had a chance to react. There was just one small piece of corndog remaining on her plate, but she still had quite a bit of rice. Emma was not happy to see her food was gone when she returned. We tried to offer her some of the leftover rice from either of Mel's meals, but she wouldn't eat them.

Today we joined Rebecca for church and then returned to Best Buy to pick up her TV. We returned with the TV and ordered pizza from Broadway Pizza. They have such good pizza. Anyway, once we were done eating, I got to work at connecting Rebecca's cable box and DVD player to the TV. We got it all hooked up just in time for the Twins game this afternoon. Her TV looked pretty good once we found the game in the HD range of the dial instead of the regular definition broadcast. At first my sister thought the TV looked too big for her living room, but I think she decided it was just the right size by the time we left.