Beetle Eyes

On the first business day of every year the Wall Street Journal publishes a special issue.  It’s a wonderful retrospective of the prior year.  This special issue is a must-have item for The Man of the House.

In Bellevue it was easy to get a copy of the Wall Street Journal.  We got in the car and drove a quarter of a mile to the shopping mall.  There were multiple sources for the newspaper at the mall.  We could go to the newsstand or the grocery store.   If both places were sold out, there were countless alternatives.

We’re not in Bellevue any more.

Before the big day we scoured Port Townsend for places that sold the Wall Street Journal.  We went to the grocery stores, the airport (don’t ask), restaurants and book stores.  The town is utterly without the Wall Street Journal.

We decided that our best course of action was to go to Sequim on the big day.  Surely a Wall Street Journal could be obtained in a town that sports a Costco and a Walmart.

January 4th found us making the hour-long drive to Sequim.  Our plan was to get the Wall Street Journal and then do our monthly Costco shopping.  It would be easy we thought.  Heck, we’d be home by noon.

We went to one grocery store.  No Wall Street Journal.  We went to a second grocery store.  Nope. Luckily, I’d brought my laptop and my cell phone.  I looked up the number of the two book stores in town and gave them a call.  Guess what?  They didn’t have the WSJ either.

Since we’ve really got to make these trips into town count, we’d brought along a bank deposit.  Don’t bankers and the Wall Street Journal go together like coffee and biscotti?  I thought so.  So I asked the bank teller.  Surprisingly, she had no idea where we could buy a Wall Street Journal.  However someone in line behind us overheard our discussion.  She suggested we go to the next town, Port Angeles (17 miles away), and buy one there.

We went back to the laptop and the cell phone.  I called book stores in Port Angeles.  They didn’t carry the WSJ.  In fact, one of the people that I spoke with said that the Wall Street Journal wasn’t sold anywhere on the Olympic Peninsula.  Evidently the area has one distributor.  That distributor doesn’t carry the WSJ and so we were out of luck.

I’m always one to rise to a challenge.  So in a Hail Mary maneuver, I made one last  phone call.  There is a single mall in this part of the country.  It’s in Silverdale, a town about two hours away from Sequim.  That mall has a Barnes and Noble.  If anyone would have a Wall Street Journal, it would be them.

I discovered that while the Silverdale Barns and Noble carries the WSJ they only get two copies every day.  (Evidently that’s all this part of the world is allotted.)  By the time we called they had sold their two issues of the Wall Street Journal.

There was nothing to do but buy our groceries at Costco and go home.  Happily, The Man of the House discovered that most of the content from the year-end issue was available online at the WSJ website.  He spent the evening printing it out.

Later we talked with my brother in Puyallup about this situation.  He says we’re not to be silly.  Next year we should just give him a call.  He’ll just buy us a copy and mail it.

Everything worked out fine and we’ve got a plan for next year.  But it really pointed out that we are so not in Bellevue any more.