A store full of over-priced kitsch and over-sized furniture
April 28, 2008At lunch today I stopped by the Circa Home Furnishings store to browse their going-out-of-business sale. And as I wandered around I couldn’t help but think, the reason your store is closing is that it’s full of over-priced furniture and accessories that nobody really needs.
Oh, and really tacky accessories like elephant statues made of leather. Cow leather apparently, I don’t think it was elephant leather. That would have been extra tacky to use the dead animal’s own leather to construct the little statues.
The prices were just God-awful high. Like there was a sofa-sized painting, meant to be hung on the wall behind one of the over-stuffed sofas also being sold in the store. The painting was of a small herd of water buffalo, which is why it caught my eye. Water buffalo are pretty common in the Philippines.
But the painting was $12,000, that was the clearance price. Original price was north of $16,000. It just wasn’t that good a painting. You were apparently paying for the size of the thing, not the quality of the art itself.
I thought the funniest part was that none of the sofas was anywhere close to that painting in price. The most expensive piece was I think $5,000. A bargain by comparison, since a sofa is actually useful for something. You can’t do anything with a large painting, but a sofa you can watch TV or take a nap or whatever.
Anyway, depending on where I go for lunch I drive by that Circa store at least once a week. I’ll try to drop in a few weeks from now. Maybe that water buffalo painting will drop to something more reasonable. I’d pay $200, but not a penny more.