09:03 – Late last month, Barbara and I stopped at the Dick’s Sporting Goods store to buy a couple of Marlin Model 60 .22LR rifles and a couple of Mossberg Maverick 88 pump-action riot guns. They had the Marlins in stock, but we had to special-order the shotguns. They said they’d give us a call when they arrived in a week to 10 days.
After waiting nearly three weeks, I finally called them Thursday to ask what was going on. As it turned out, their wholesaler had accidentally canceled the order. The guy at Dick’s said they’d reordered them and they should be in by the 24th. I wasn’t happy about that, but I didn’t have much choice other than to wait yet another week. Friday afternoon, they called and said they’d gotten in a regular shipment and asked if I wanted two of those. So Barbara and I went down yesterday after a Sam’s Club run to pick them up.
Originally, we’d paid $220 each for them, but they gave us 10% off on that whole order because we applied for a Dick’s MasterCard. The shotguns ended up costing us $198 each, which I was happy with. But the manager at the gun counter said they needed to zero out that original transaction and run a new transaction. I said fine, as long as we got the 10% discount. When we finally got through all the paperwork and the manager carried the shotguns downstairs to the checkout lane, the woman at the register said that they were now selling those shotguns for $180 rather than $220, so she rang it up at $180 each. I pointed out that that didn’t reflect the 10% discount, so she issued a $36 gift card to make up the difference. Barbara grabbed that and said that she’d get something she wanted with it. So the end of the story is that we now have two more riot guns at home, for which we ended up paying only $162 each, the same amount we paid for the Marlin Model 60’s.
Incidentally, when I mentioned Tess Pennington’s prepping book I said that my initial impression was that it wasn’t bad. I was wrong. It’s not just bad. It’s horribly, ridiculously bad. Ms. Pennington is an anti-vaxxer, a proponent of “alternative medicine”, and generally anti-science. As just one example, in her short chapter on preparing for a pandemic, she wastes two full pages describing how to make up woo-woo mixtures of essential oils and spices to prevent or treat deadly viral diseases. Good luck with that. And in a chapter on alternative light sources she recommends a method that she says requires only a bottle and water to provide as much light as a 50-watt bulb. She doesn’t give any specifics, but tells her readers to look up the details on the Internet. Yeah, right.