Sunday, I did sound at church, so everyone opted for second service. My parents, Bethany, Andrew, and Heather all came to Church. After church, Heather and mom had a chance to talk some about what plans we had for the wedding and decorating the building. We then headed to lunch. We had lunch at Le Peep, a breakfast / brunch / lunch place, where Andrew faced the dilemma of biscuits and gravy vs his restaurant standard cheeseburger. In the end he wound up with the burger, and seemed pretty happy with it.
After lunch we said our goodbyes and everyone headed home. Everyone except Heather and I…. we said “hey Target is right here, lets just register and be done with it.” So our next stop was Target.
Registering at Target: Let me start off by saying the system they have at Target is roughly 100000.5 times better than Bed Bath and Beyond’s. To start off nobody sits you down and tries to tell you how bad you need to have $100+ a place sitting china on your list. Second, and this won’t be as big of a deal for everyone but we just typed in our own information, and I prefer typing to having to fill out forms with little blanks and bad labels. Finally, the scanner they gave us had a real user interface.
The BB&B scanner was a 8 line LCD screen, a keypad, and a scanner. If you want to remove something from your list, scan the bar-code on this piece of paper! If you want to put two of an item on your list, it’s easy! Just remember to press ‘M’ then “enter” then the number of items you want. No the on-screen text wont really help you, and if you press the wrong key… well you wont have any idea if the item you scanned is even still on the list, the screen will just display some dire warning about incorrect UPC codes. Whats that? you wanted to see whats on your list? Go home and check on our website! We here at the store can’t even tell, but wait a day or so for the website because we have to type up that form you filled out a minute ago. Need to remove the item you scanned 2 items ago? Have we mentioned you can edit your list on the website? Because we don’t really have any access here… oh and isn’t this china shiny? Why are you scanning that item again, you clearly already scanned it… oh because you wanted two of them and though our interface was “clunky” well sorry, you will have to go through the user interface.
The Target scanner was basically a PDA with a pistol grip, but it had a very well done user interface. The scanner felt better in your hand, the scan beam was brighter, making it easier to aim and it seemed to pick up UPC codes with less waggling. The display was large, color, and a touch-screen, with nice options so you could add multiple items, browse your list, remove items at will, or just marvel at the pleasure of holding a device designed for the end-user. Also, scanning something twice? Adds two of them to your list!
I know I didn’t say much about the scanner when I mentioned getting registered at BB&B, but that was because at the time I just assumed the scanner was suppose to suck. In the end I guess maybe the scanner didn’t change the fact that there wasn’t a ton of stuff we felt we could use at Target, so BB&B may have the last laugh in the registry department.
Some people say doing all that is “fun”… to me its still shopping… I get to do it with Heather so its not so bad, but I am glad we are done with it. As of right now we have a grand total of 200 items across all our registries, and from what the lady at BB&B said, that number is much too low, and we will have guests complaining. I think at this point I would tell them to please come to the wedding without a gift, or write us a nice card that we can look at when we aren’t so overwhelmed. Just the card would be fine, I really don’t know what I would do with a gift-card at this point, assuming most of the list was already taken I literally don’t need ANYTHING more from those stores. Include cash if you insist on giving us something, we can speed up paying off one of our cars.
-Jordan
Nelsons 