A major accomplishment in assholery, a reliable source of profit, and something about tree burials...
Every once in awhile I'll find myself in a marine store looking to buy something or other but it's become a fairly rare occasion. Which is sad in a way as I really used to enjoy spending time in a chandlery, if for no other reason than I'd often get good ideas on how to cobble up rigs and suchlike.
Not these days though...
Truth be told, the only thing I seem to get when visiting my local marine store is getting pissed off. Like yesterday when I needed to get a handful of machine screws and found the 3-inch 1/4" machine screws were $4.99 a piece.
Admittedly, I'd just come from the local Ace hardware where they did not have any 3-inch 1/4" machine screws but the place where they should have been said that if they had them they'd cost $1.99 a pop.
I mention this because the place I normally buy machine screws stateside sells them for 25-cents if you're buying just one and 23-cents each if you buy twenty-five and they'll ship them to me down here in the Virgin Islands for free.
Being both frugal and not an idiot, I decided to not buy any screws locally. I'll order them stateside and get them in a few days. Still, the idea that the "friendly" local marine store had jacked up the price to that extent really pissed me off. For those adverse to doing math, my stateside seller sells 25 machine screws for $5.75 with free shipping and the local store would charge me $9.98 for 2 screws.
As a quick reference West Marine sells 25 of the same size machine screws for $10.49 not cheap but certainly not the model of avaricious greed-heads our local marine store seems to be channeling.
On the way out of the store we passed their masking tape which cost $10.55 a roll while Walmart sells the exact same tape for $3.83 a roll which is just adding insult to injury.
Such marine industry hijinks pretty much accounts for why I don't spend much time in marine stores anymore.
Listening to The Veldt
So it goes...
