THE POTTERY BARN SUCKS.....or how the Chinese stole Christmas....

So I convinced the neighbor to get up early today......in the cold and the rain.....and go with me to a "Decorating Class" at our local Pottery Barn. Being a good sport she went along with it but I'm sure 10 minutes into the "class" she would have liked to kill me. Now I've been snookered by these folks in the past with their attempt to teach people how to better improve their living arrangements. I swore I would never go back after the last time as the class is truly LAME........this time I got an e-mail stating that they had gotten together with an editor of Real Simple magazine to put on a presentation you would be stupid to miss....Call me dumb, I interpreted the e-mail to mean that an actual person from the magazine would be at the store and give us good info.....maybe a free copy of the magazine.....Hey, when you get me up out of bed on a Sunday morning in the rain I expect some sort of "free goodie".....I could have stayed home and watched the Home Shopping Network because it was nothing more then a big sales pitch......No one from Real Simple just 2 salespeople from P.B. who tried to hawk their Reindeer collection of holiday crap.... Now, I wasn't the only moron in the place, there had to have been 50 women or more who looked shocked after 35 minutes when they handed out our "Goodie Bags" to find 4 paper recipe cards from the magazine and a 10% off coupon......How lame? Very, because the day before I received a 20% off coupon via e-mail....The hour class was reduced to a bit more then a half hour, no one had any questions and the store manager, although very peppy and excited that so many people had showed up, couldn't have revived this group if Tom Selleck showed up to feed us Krispy Kreme doughnuts....

I made my small purchase of a velvet Christmas stocking.....I wasn't about to not use that coupon....and we proceeded on to do further shopping and ofcourse have lunch....At one of my favorite's, Williams Sonoma I picked up a few things for daughter including a cool pair of kitchen shears from Kuhn Rikon of Switzerland....on to LeMadleine for our French lunch......then one more stop of the day.....I picked up for Miss Sophie an adorable "Steiff" horse, you know with the button in the ear. I thought it would be great to bribe her at the airport in 3 weeks so she thinks we're the favorite grandparents.....Ever since we visited Germany in the early 70's I have been a fan of Steiff and although they now make this cheaper version they still are cute......

Okay, I'm home now with my stash and I start unloading the bags to show the Boss what I found....He too likes Steiff so he immediately said "Did they have any more, maybe we should go back and get another"......pulling up the Steiff site on the Internet he tries to find the horse by it's name and asks me to read the name off the famous yellow tag.......No name....just Steiff....this is very unusual, they always have some sort of cute name for all their animals......Upon further inspection (like the back of the tiny tag in it's ear) what do I read......Yes, you guessed it......Made in China......totally disappointed we decide to keep it anyway because it is cute and the price wasn't bad....Then out of the W.S. bag comes the kitchen shears, remember they came from Switzerland......Oh, no they didn't.......Made in China......you have to be kidding. It says right smack dab on the label Kuhn Rikon Switzerland. Nope China......okay, I'm getting kind of tee'd off by now. One more thing to go.....The beautiful velvet stocking.....CHINA........ I don't know about you folks but am I the only one that thinks this is getting out of hand....I will be truly disappointed the day I find out that Tom Selleck isn't an American that he was really born in China.........