>The main reason that I do almost all my shopping (other than groceries) at Amazon has absolutely nothing to do with price. It has to do with convenience. You can't buy much of anything here in Ellensburg. Any "big ticket" item has to be purchased down in Yakima, a 45 mile drive (one-way) and you may not even find what you're looking for there. It is so much easier to simply browse around Amazon and I'll eventually find what I need. Plus, I get "free" 2-day shipping ("free" in quotes, because I *do* pay $75/year for that shipping, but it quickly pays for itself).
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>If I happened to be at a store for some reason and found what I wanted there, I'd buy it there. There's no guarantee that Amazon will have it any cheaper. But, I really hate shopping and hardly ever go to anything other than the grocery store.
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>Oh, here's an anecdote you'll like (since you throw out your cute little anecdotes all the time <g>). Back in August, I needed to get a birthday present for my grandson, who was turning 4. I knew that I wanted to get him Play-doh, but wasn't sure what kinds of "sets" they had. I was in town anyway, so I thought I'd just go to the Fred Meyer's store. Sure enough, they had several different sets of Play-doh and I bought one that I thought Ian would like. Now, here's where I didn't think things through ... if I had bought that Play-doh on Amazon, I could have had free 2-day shipping. I went to the local UPS store and ended up paying more for the shipping than the cost of the stupid Play-doh!!! Oh dopey me!! I won't do that again!!! If it's something for me, no problem with buying it in a store (if I just *happen* to be in one) ... but anything that needs shipping to friends or family, I'll buy at Amazon!
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>Just finished my Christmas shopping for the grandkids on Amazon. Think they'll like Etch-a-sketch? I know I loved it when I was a kid!
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Great story(-ies), Bonita. You should write more stories and less code ;-)

I was another Etch-a-Sketch fan. We probably all were. It was a fairly gearhead toy.

I had an older cousin who was mentally retarded. Not in the way of just being "simple," though; he was what came to be called an idiot savant. His particular talent was Etch-a-Sketch. I remember him creating one picture of a farm scene they had driven by on the way to our house, It was brilliant, including a fence drawn on a diagonal in perfect perspective. The fence posts got shorter and shorter and eventually almost disappeared into the vanishing point. You will remember that the Etch-a-Sketch was gridlike, oriented around horizontal and vertical moves. Just doing diagonals in the first place was amazing.