Your least favorite store or business to get dragged into

Childhood: Fabric stores. Five minutes in a fabric store would feel like an eternity. I still have no idea how long my mom spent in these places because time skewed like this, it could have been ten minutes or four hours. I made up a game to pass the time about an alternate universe where they were starved for fabric and had no way to make their own, and every bolt of fabric I touched got transported there. I'd imagine how grateful all its residents were, applauding my every touch, and what they'd do with each fabric ("finally my baby won't freeze to death").

I spent way too much time in hardware stores because my parents built their own house, but I kind of grew to like these as an adult.

I pretty much hate going into head shops with my husband (I just can't look at stuff for near the amount of time he can), and I am sure he would say the same for me about taking him to yarn stores.

Craft stores, like joann's fabrics or michaels. they are sad in an old-fashioned, obsolete kind of way and yet somehow always seem really busy and you have to wait forever at the checkout line. I may just be saying this because my wife asked me to drive her to joann's tomorrow for her to buy supplies to make xmas presents, and I don't want to.

Department stores with my mom when I was a kid and too young to let wander off. I'm talking Dillard's and JC Penney, UGH. The stifling boredom.

it doesn't come up often but i think of these two

pet stores - depressing, all the cages

jewelry stores - i am not interested in a single thing the store offers, i would rather be anywhere else

as a kid, definitely hardware stores. when we moved into our house in Maryland, my dad was doing lots of fixit work on it and it seemed like we'd have to go to the hardware store every weekend. nothing to do, nowhere even really to sit down.

Oh man no kidding about craft stores n/a, Hobby Lobby was the only place in Las Cruces where you could buy acrylic paints or canvas or art supplies of any kind. And the lines were soooo slow. So slow and long! I have no idea how the few people working there managed to ring things up so slowly. I admit sometimes if I was just buying a $1 pack of buttons or something to just walking out with it out of rage.

I usually didn't mind Michael's so much. It was weird and cheap and outmoded, but there was always something to play with, like unpainted decorative foam balls, or something. From kid's POV again.

It was always weird going with my mom to the store where my mom bought "garments" (Mormon underwears). You'd just kind of wait in line in this totally empty and nondescript room until it was your turn for the lady to hand my mom her size of garments. The absolute blankest of walls and decor.

It always makes me lol – kind of – when some really gendered store like a yarn store or a maternity clothing store has this one sad little chair with a "guy magazine" about fishing or camping or football from seven years ago.

supermarket. i can shop for myself and wander, but if i'm dragged in and delayed i'm an antichrist

Childhood: plant nurseries. Mum & Dad practically lived there, avid gardeners. There's only so much hide & seek you can play before you're sitting on a pile of bagged fertilizer waiting for parents to re-emerge from the fernery section.
It's not so much the nursery itself that I didn't likebut how goddamn LONG we would be trapped there.

Now: Barbecues Galore, barbecue sections of any store, Walmart. Mr Veg is forever on endless quests for wood chunks that arent mildewed, and lump charcoal that only appears at Walmart during summer where we go & buy 10 bags at a time. I can't stay in the car I have to help push a cart of charcoal >:(
But it's the price I pay for enjoying delicious barbecue, so

xpost Darragh otm abt supermarkets. Give me a list or there will be blood. Aimless wandering is death.

I guess this counts as a "business": when I was a kid my dad got into making wine at home as a hobby. for a couple of months it seemed like every weekend we'd have to get up superearly, all pile in the car, and drive out to some vineyard in the country so my dad could, I don't know, taste grapes or something to decide which grapes to use in his terrible homemade wine. it was always cold and i'd be tired and bored and we'd just sit on a blanket on a hill with nothing to do the whole time.

Grownups sure do have boring interests when you're a kid. That sounds pretty ugh

Oh man, when my parents were going to start an ostrich farm, we'd drive out to area ostrich farms so my dad could talk to people who owned ostriches & check out their setups. They were invariably in the middle of nowhere, and we lived in the middle of nowhere, so it was a long drive from nowhere to nowhere, usually four or five hours. And then it's just be some stranger's house out in the country and my dad talking to some stranger. Looking at the ostriches for a bit was interesting but after that it was just the worst waiting game. And then we'd sleep in the back of the truck because my dad was too cheap to pay for a hotel. Great times.

Secondhand bricks, anyone? Driving out to bumfuck nowhere for a pile of old bricks from some farmer's broken down old dairy, put on a pair of leather gloves, form a line & spend all day putting bricks in the back of the ute.
See also: firewood.

these are all kickass hobbies but jeez leave the tykes at home

I think I'd chew my own arm off before I'd go into a party supply store.

Oh, I love party supply stores, they're so weird and depressing!

I guess this is the "Ghost World" part of me talking. "Look how shitty this is, it's so pure."

You guys, nothing -- nothing! -- compares with the boredom of being toted to hundreds of political fundraisers without another child in sight, no siblings, and nothing to do.

Things I did while at political fundraisers in between dodging probing questions from strangers I had no interest in talking to:

* hid behind a potted plant and read (this is most of my childhood)
* made balloon animals
* walked on stilts
* sucked so much helium that i passed out (this was funny because no one noticed)
* ran in circles until i got so dizzy/tired that i threw up (parents still did not take me home)
* sifted through people's coat pockets in the coat check room

second place goes to JC Penneys

thrift stores in areas where all the decent stuff is gonna be gone and there's just overpriced musty crap everywhere

when my dad dragged me to work he took me onto this thing

http://www.psm-sensors.co.uk/images/atlantic_dawn.jpg

which was basically little boy heaven. we were let run riot usually.

Wow! Awesome!

Me going to work with Dad (plumber) = sitting in the ute listening to am radio while he dug out someone's blocked sewer.

gun shops. hideous customers, hideous staff, hideous products, hideous decor.

plus, if you got dragged in...

by cold, dead hands iirc

As a kid, it was pottery shops. My parents would take us on holiday along the coast and every pottery shop we passed (lots and lots in my memory), we'd have to stop and go in. It became a running joke between my sister and I, how BORING it was to hang around in these places where we weren't allowed to touch anything.

Now, it's either the gaming stores (EB Games and such) or those nutrition hut places that sell protein powder and vitamins. My husband can spend hours in either one and it drives me insane. I've never been a super patient person.

Long ago I was starting to enjoy Wal-Mart but over the past two years the crowding there has become unbearable and the people who shop there seem to have a lack of peripheral vision and do that weird aisle dodging crap. There are also people there that excuse themselves when they aren't even near you! What in the hell is up with that phenomena? Why are you excusing yourself for something you aren't doing? You aren't even cutting through me or anything, we're not even in the same vicinity! Damn Wal-Mart.

^And just to clarify, I feel like I'm dragging myself there. Which I am.

Christmas Tree Shops, i avoid at all costs. A million old ladys trying to get at cheap shit at all costs. Place makes me want to punch old ladys.

those huge cosmetic sections in department stores, when they're busy it feels like some sort of robotic human end times, orange faces everywhere and the perfume smells make my eyes water.

* ran in circles until i got so dizzy/tired that i threw up (parents still did not take me home)
* sifted through people's coat pockets in the coat check room

Kinda lol but mostly sad.

No store stands out from childhood -- my mother took all of us on all her errands so it was the grocery, the bank, the fabric store, the department store, the florist, stopping by the church organist's house to drop off music...pretty much ad infinitum.

For adulthood, honest to god, it has been RECORD STORES. Never was v interested in records.

I loved hardware stores (good smells of wood and solvent and oils, and lots of bins of screws and bolts and colorful things to look at and play with, plus you couldn't really break anything there so you didn't have to "behave"), and feed & grain/farm stores, because you could plunge your hands into the barrels of cracked corn and birdseed.

I'm very much someone who likes to have a list of what I need to buy, go in, get it and GTFO. So pretty much any store or business. I'm not fun to go shopping with, I get grumpy and impatient very quickly.

The one exception to this is RECORD STORES, where I can happily look around for hours on end.

my mum used to stop at a garden centre/greengrocers which was on the main road into the town where we lived, because it was always the last stop on whatever journey i came to really hate it and groan everytime she turned the indicator on as she was about to turn in. don't like the sight of it to this day.

as a child; garden centres, fabric shops (wish I'd thought of a cool game to play like Abbott, but instead I was just bored), clothes shops. Hardware stores, especially the big superstores, were OK, because I was already interested in making stuff. But Argos (UK catalogue store) was the worst. We would spend ages in there, even though the plastic coated in-store catalogue had identical pages to the free catalogue that you could take away with you. I couldn't understand - and still don't understand - why my parents just didn't decide WTF they wanted at home. That feeling carries over today to practically all stores with an online presence - you can check out all this shit online, why do you need to spend hours in the store???

I'm very much someone who likes to have a list of what I need to buy, go in, get it and GTFO.

^^^ yes

This thread makes me so sad because, basically, when I was a child, I absolutely LOVED fabric shops. I could spend hours looking at the pretty fabric patterns (I'm quite lucky I grew up in the 70s, so there was eye-bending paisley everywhere, which made me happiest of all.) If I was really lucky, my mum would buy me some "remenants" which were usually cheap enough to allow a child to cut to pieces for art projects and the like. I was completely obsessed with velvet for a long time.

I think my least favourite shop was the boring ecclesiastical bookshop. (not to be confused with the nice ecclesiastical tat shop that had hundreds and possibly even thousands of those stained glass sucker hangy things, and I liked looking at them.)

I don't often get myself dragged into shops these days. But my number one hatred is probably BABY SHOPS (not shops that sell babies, shops that sell ridiculous overpriced tat for babies, oh my god, my mother loves these, I did not REALISE there were so many baby shops in St. Ives ugh ugh ugh).

I used to hate shoe shops, as well, but I've learned to accept them.

i can spend hours in a Target though

Oh, and car shops. Oh my god car showrooms are the most snoozesome place on earth for a child. I have never been in one since, but oh dear lord, DO NOT WANT.

xp Then I've got you in my sights (bah dum pish!)

I think we played outside if possible, at a lot of places. Eventually I preferred being left in the car because I could at least read, but it wasn't always allowed. Man, until this thread I'd forgotten all about the INTENSITY of the boredom and trapped-ness of being taken shopping!

We definitely used to do things like hide under the hanging racks of clothes in mall stores and stuff. Probably embarrassed the shit outta my mom by being rambunctious EVERYWHERE, not like nice children who waited quietly.

(I wish there were a converse thread of "favourite shops to be dragged in as a child" because I could quite happily spend hours and hours in Paperchase and also Liberty, these were happy fun "a reward for being so good on your mum's shopping trip" places which I still love to this day for this reason alone.)

Repeat offender was my mother, in craft stores. Even if it was just buying some glitter to put on cards or something. Should be a five minute job, right? Do you have any idea how many type of glitter there are? There's the powdered stuff that looks like it belongs in a chemistry set. Then there's the stuff like miniature metallic confetti. etc., etc..
Actually the worst offender was my father, in hardware stores. He would never ask the assistants for help finding things. So we'd spend forty minutes wandering around an aircraft hanger like enormo-warehouse, and often leave without the item because he couldn't find it. Whereas knowadays it takes me two minutes max. "Excuse me mate, where are the widgets?" "They're over there." "Thanks." £$^%^*&%^&%&***!!! IT'S SIMPLE!!!

my mother and grandmother used to drag me into this place called "Basketville" in sturbridge, ma. I fucking hated that place...it was nothing but baskets and they would spend hours in there.

Sometimes grown-ups like to go to places that make them feel good/relaxed and just...hang around there like their time is their own. Silly grown-ups. Don't they know all of their time is OURS???

I loved craft stores, and hardware stores! I mean, hardware stores... I could spend HOURS looking at the racks of brightly coloured paint chips. My parents used to try to persuade me I could only have one, and no, I could not bring home every paint chip in the shop.

When I was a kid I hated the hardware store. Now I mainly just hate waiting to pick up my prescriptions at the pharmacy -- otherwise I'm able to avoid most places I dislike.

I love fabric shops, though! JoAnns is kind of pathetic but they occasionally have good deals on stuff like flannel, but I love a good fabric store because sewing is my source of geeky relaxation.

I'd forgotten all about the INTENSITY of the boredom and trapped-ness of being taken shopping!

I don't ever miss being a child, and especially I don't miss that "having" to do things. It's easy to forget as an adult that you don't ever ever have to put up with being bored. Then: "Come along snoball, I have to look in this DIY shop for what will seem like several days". Now: "OK fine, you go and do that, meanwhile I will be doing something productive with my time."

the lettering of the Big Lots sign on the outside of the store was the ugliest shade of orange imaginable

in terms of retail locations K-Mart was second only to BIG LOTS for schoolyard insults. Example: "'_________'s parents can't afford Nikes, so he has to wear K-Mart Sliders." "Dude wishes he had K-Mart Sliders. I heard his folks buy all of his clothes at BIG LOTS." The only thing worse than BL was a fictional store known as "JJ Giveaway" which, as an adult, I would certainly go to if it actually existed.

Loved Big Lots. Christmas lights and tiki torches, both on sale in February.

this thread made me remember that sometimes I had to hang out at the hair salon while my mom got a perm

My brother would cite hair salon as his least favorite overscented place. By which I mean: he didn't like it because of the large variety of strong smells.

I think it's because of those experiences that to this day I still kinda like the smell of perm'd, burned hair

my mom still drags me to macy's when I go home to visit

my dad still makes me bring him to dollar stores but I like dollar stores

my mom too. and it's always macy's. and she's always got a coupon

haha everytime I go home my mom has a stack of $10 off $30 or 20% off coupons or w/e

I have to admit that I do have a macy's card under my name that she made me sign up for so she could get an extra 20% off whatever purchase she made that day

see also: my mom's mock outrage when she finds out she can't return a shirt because she bought it...a year ago (but she's still got the receipt and it's still got tags)

I wonder if this will still be a phenomenon 20 years from now. will people still reminisce about how their parents bored the shit out of them by taking them shopping? seems like most kids I pass by in grown-up shops have a nintendo DS or their mom's iphone or something and are engrossed in beating games. I wonder if kids still get bored today anymore.

Candle places in general, section of stores that have scented candles...I can't do it. It's like the fragrance equivalent of a roomful of people talking at once:PINE! LAVENDER! MANGO! THE OCEAN! PUMPKIN PIE! CINNAMON! FRANGIPANI!

;_;

I love those smellovision overkill shops so much. Lush, The Pier - OH GOD I MISS THE PIER SO MUCH. I could happily spend all day in a Pier just sniffing the candles. Lush kinda burns my nostrils out a bit after I've been in there for over half an hour, but oh, <3 so much, all the competing smells. See also: spice shops.

I have like secret fantasies about visiting those bazaars in Istanbul that have sacks and sacks of spices of all colours and exotic smells and just taking a giant nose dive, nose first into a pile of fragrant spices.

IKEA is another of those places (like Argos) where YOU CAN GET A CATALOGUE so why DO YOU NEED TO SPEND HOURS IN THERE?!

cause you need to sit in a chair, lie on a bed, etc. You can READ that a bureau is 200cm high but it's not the same as standing next to it. That said IKEA is kind of the ultimate answer to this question.

I hate being dragged into any store. I'm a precision attack shopper, and I have about one minute between feeling like I'm about ready to go and reaching a state of GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE NOW ARRRGH so I always shop alone.* I decided to go recreational shopping with an acquaintance a couple of years ago, to see if maybe I was missing something, and it was a deeply miserable experience that I will never repeat.

I like malls fine if I can start by spending an hour or so in the Ruby Tuesday's bar.

And I LOVED Ames as a kid b/c my mom/grand mom would just dump me in the toy aisle. Also any store with a stationary aisle was a-ok because I could entertain myself for a good hour looking at pencils.

*Exception: Jeff and I are really good together at grocery shopping and, oddly, outlet mall shopping (we go stock up on t-shirts, underpants, work shirts, work shoes, etc. whenever we visit my family in Delaware, "Home of Tax-free Shopping") because we have similar strategies and philosophies. Also I'm good at going with Jeff to offer advice and support while he buys something because I know it will just be a matter of "That looks good, get it" or "Try this size... Good, lets go."

Like, on outlet mall day, we look at a map of the outlets, plan our route, plan meeting points (You go into J Crew and I'll go into Clark's/Bostonian and L'egg's/Hanes/Bali and we'll meet at the kettle corn cart in 45 minutes), and pretty much reach retail saturation at exactly the same moment. Then we go back to my parents' house and drink beer and run up their pay-per-view bill like a couple of teenagers.

All my worst ones have been mentioned, but I will say that all of these experiences would have been much better if I had an iPhone as a kid. I'd sit in a fabric store all day if I had Peggle and 9 Innings.

I like Yankee Candle.

or drop7

you can be singular in your purpose at Ikea but you still have to walk through th eentire goddam store

― dayo, Wednesday, November 10, 2010 4:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

pro tip: ikeas have a corridor through the middle so you can get in, get to the section you want, and get out in like 10 minutes. like the secret passage in clue.

plus ikea is great anyway. always look forward to ikea, even if the crap i buy there almost always turns out to be junk.

DOLLAR STORES ARE THE WORST FUCKING THING EVER

What's wrong with them? Sometimes I feel the need both a neon orange plastic mini watergun and a gallon of milk at the same time.

And a gallon of lime Fabuloso.

And a dvd of racist bugs bunny cartoons in a cardboard sleeve.

and a balsa wood glider plane.

You know what the fucking best thing for dollar stores is? Glow sticks. [ / no rave-o ]

In every dollar store ever...

love the idea of dollar stores, but they always turn out hideous & depressing. they remind me that nothing is of value and everything will ultimately be discarded.

love big lots though. much the same as dollar stores, but every month or so they get a great heap of overstock DVDs that they sell for $3 dollars. have found lots of cool shit for super cheap. paul bartel movies, almodovar, 70s and 80s horror, treasure trove i tell you. no other reason to set foot in the store.

pro tip: ikeas have a corridor through the middle so you can get in, get to the section you want, and get out in like 10 minutes. like the secret passage in clue.

if you know how to use the secret corridors in ikea you've already lost imo

I remember now that as a kid, whenever my parents had any serious shopping to do, they'd drop me off at toys r us and I'd go straight for the action figure section. I'd ogle and grope the boxes of action figures, and when they were done they'd come back and pick me up. naturally they never bought me anything.

Does it seem shocking now that so many of our parents felt okay with leaving us unaccompanied in public? Would someone who did that with their kid now be immediately crucified in public opinion?

yes, because everybody is "OMG PEDOPHILES" nowadays

I got caught up on the "For Better or For Worse" series over a six-month span of hanging out in the paperbacks section of Food 4 Less while my mom grocery shopped.

K-Mart was a good time too...they had a pretty decent selection of star wars micro machines.

Pleasant Plains - yes! My big thing was "mom, can I go next door to the news stand to look at magazines?"

In relation to the first post; WTF is a "head shop"?

This might help: In every head shop ever

A store that sells drug paraphernalia and tie-dye shirts and little wizard figurines and Guatemalan wool sweaters. xp

HERE THERE BE HIPPIES

Aha. That makes sense. Fucking hate them.

when I was a kid I was dragged to car dealerships a lot. My dad was perpetually either buying a new car, test driving a new car, or some bullshit like that. Even when we went to other cities, there was a lot of time spent at car dealerships OR outlet golf gear shops. I fucking hate both of them.

Remember when supermarkets had great toy sections? That's where I was when Mum made me go grocery shopping with her. Looking at cap guns, bags of army men, barbie outfits

I made up a game to pass the time about an alternate universe where they were starved for fabric and had no way to make their own, and every bolt of fabric I touched got transported there. I'd imagine how grateful all its residents were, applauding my every touch, and what they'd do with each fabric ("finally my baby won't freeze to death").

thankin' u for the biggest laugh of my day

omg homo II otm - to this day i can't stand even driving along auto row.

I fucking hated when I got dragged to Spatula City. Those commercials are bullshit.

I made up a game to pass the time about an alternate universe where they were starved for spatulas and had no way to make their own, and every spatula I touched got transported there. I'd imagine how grateful all its residents were, applauding my every touch, and what they'd do with each spatula ("finally I can flip my pancakes").

primark in liverpool is one of the gateway's to hell; a vacuum that sucks hoards in and spits them back out dead-eyed, their souls replaced by a brown paper bag.

SOrry, I hate it when I come into a thread late (stupid time difference) but:

Childhood: plant nurseries. Mum & Dad practically lived there, avid gardeners. There's only so much hide & seek you can play before you're sitting on a pile of bagged fertilizer waiting for parents to re-emerge from the fernery section.

this was my FAVOURITE thing to do as a kid! Every time we went to the plant nursery I was in HEAVEN, all these plants everywhere it was like a maze and I loved it, I dunno why exactly. Its not like I've turned into gardener extraordinare.

My childhood bored dreads never involved shops. They involved granny's nursing home, church, and old people in general.

Oh but Mandee's thing about car dealerships reminds me, I hated that. My dad sold cars. Any time we had to hang out at his dealership waiting for him to finish work I loathed. The smell of new-car-rubber-vinyl-leather I cant stand.