I’ve never really cared much for shopping, whether it be for clothes, shoes, housewares, or anything else. I get easily overwhelmed by too many choices, and I declare everything too expensive.
And being that I’ve never really kept up with the latest trends, sometimes I can be pretty out of the loop. This story is about one of those times…
When my husband and I got married, we were given a very generous $250 gift certificate to Pottery Barn from my very chic Aunt and Uncle back east. They wanted us to pick out some things for our new home.
So one sunny Saturday morning, we decided to go and spend our gift. We had never been to Pottery Barn before, so we called information for the address (remember those days before Google??). Turns out Pottery Barn was located in a little beach town, about 20 minutes from our home.
I should have known something was amiss as we pulled into the parking lot, as it wasn’t so much a store as it was an open-air type market that sold, well…actual pottery.
I mean, there was ONLY pottery. Plain, clay pottery. Big pots, medium pots, small pots, pots of all shapes and sizes. I had never seen so many pots in my life.
I was a little surprised that my aunt and uncle from New York would even know about this little pottery place, let alone get us such a large gift card to such a place.
My husband and I looked at each other. “Huh,” he said. “Not really what I pictured.”
“Same,” I replied.
I looked up at the sign out front. “But it definitely SAYS ‘Pottery Barn’. It has to be the place.”
We started looking around and quickly realized that $250 was going to buy us about a million little clay pots.
At a loss of what else to do, we grabbed a large metal wagon and spent almost two hours selecting pot after pot, pulling the wagon around the grounds, carefully adding the cost of the pots up in our head to make sure we didn’t go over our gift certificate.
I started to stress out. Did we even have enough room on our small townhome patio for all these? How much was it going to cost to buy plants to put in all these pots? We were 24 years old and neither of us had ever planted anything in our lives.
I thought once again that this was a REALLY odd gift from my young, hip, aunt and uncle.
With our wagon finally full, we went up to the cashier, who rang up our carefully chosen pots. She told us the total and I presented our gift certificate.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“A gift certificate,” I replied cheerfully. “It was a wedding gift.”
“That’s not us.”
“I’m sorry…what do you mean, it’s not you?”
“That’s not our store.”
“But it says Pottery Barn RIGHT there,” I pointed to the gift certificate.
“That’s Pottery Barn, the CHAIN. You know, at the MALL.” The woman was looking at us like we were crazy.
My husband and I looked at each other. Oh, crap.
“So do you want to pay a different way?” she asked us.
I looked at all the clay pots we had chosen, NONE of which we actually wanted, not to mention, we couldn’t afford to actually pay real cash for them.
I grabbed one small pot off the wagon.
“We’ll just take this one,” I said, as the woman glared at us.
I wanted to crawl under a rock.
Red with embarrassment, we grabbed our little pot and practically ran to the car, where we burst out laughing at our naivete.
To this day, every once and a while, someone in our families will say, “Remember the time Janene and Brian went to Pottery Barn??” And they laugh and laugh.
Also, the second shocker was when our naive newlywed selves finally went to the REAL Pottery Barn and quickly realized that $250 would buy us, like, one fitted sheet and a spoon. 😂
*For the story of how my husband and I met, check out my post here: “The Story Of Us…Notes From A Marriage” imightbefunny.com/marriage-humor/the-story-of-us/
