The Princess and Hero go shopping

Occasionally the Hero expresses a need to go shopping at the nearby mall; this sometimes occurs as often as every five years or so. There was a little aberration in this schedule around Christmastime last year, when a dead car battery necessitated a trip to Sears, and almost an entire afternoon was spent in the mall while waiting for the car to be ready. In the Hero's opinion, this is exactly the sort of cataclysmic event that should be covered in The Complete Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook.

Like many men, the Hero has a detailed list of what he is looking for when he goes to the mall. On this trip, the list looked like this: 

dress shoes size 9 1/2, cool glasses

When the Princess goes to the mall, she also has a list, which generally looks something like this:

stuff to wear, stuff for the house, stuff on sale, stuff not on sale but which might go on sale in the near future, stuff I might need but don't know it yet, stuff I don't need but might as well buy anyway

You can see that the Hero's list is optimized for speed, while the Princess's list is optimized for spending money. This sometimes presents a problem when they shop together, as the Princess is genetically unable to shop in a speedy manner, and spending money has been known to cause a severe allergic reaction in the Hero.

On this trip the Princess and Hero also had an item on their joint list: refrigerator. Appliances generally require a little more shopping time, because of the expense and also because the Hero firmly believes in asking plenty of questions of the salesperson ("Why is this refrigerator so much more?" "Do you work on commission?" "How would you get a 9x13 container of cookies in this tiny freezer?"). During this grilling the Princess usually wanders off, pretending she does not know the Hero and feigning great interest in the vacuum cleaners on display.

But this time the appliance business was conducted with surprising speed, mainly because the  Princess and Hero had forgotten to take measurements of their old refrigerator, and therefore deciding on a new one was pretty well a useless exercise. This did not prevent the salesperson, however, from being grilled. (Although one salesperson did escape grilling by virtue of being very young and, in the Hero's view, probably not terribly interested in, or knowledgeable about, refrigerators.)

In fact it turned out to be Grill a Salesperson Day everywhere the Hero and Princess went. The shoe salesperson was persuaded to give a complete history of leather as a component of shoes, as well as its proper use and care. At Pearle Vision two salespersons split the task of handling the Hero's questions about glasses, the first claiming after some time that she "had to leave now." The Hero received a primer in polarized lenses, progressive lenses, bendable frames, titanium frames, plastic frames, frames with curlicues, lenses without frames, frames without lenses, etc.

The Hero's purchases completed, they speedily exited the mall. The Hero does regret that he did not go with the "glasses in about an hour" store, necessitating another visit to the mall within 10 days to pick up his new glasses. Throw in another visit back to the refrigerator display, and the Princess expects that he will not be due to visit the mall again for roughly 17 years.

Which means she has plenty of time to shop for the items on her list.