This morning I went to Broadway Panhandler’s closing sale. I’ve seen their annual sales going on before in the adjacent yard, but I never went early to secure a place in line. I arrived twenty minutes before the sale started, and I didn’t get in until an hour later. By that time, the line stretched more than a block, full of people ready to pick up as much All-Clad as they could carry. People would walk in, and by the time they walked through the tent just once, their arms would be weighted down with four giant All-Clad boxes. I wondered if they even knew what they were buying.

I think that sales like this are quickly becoming irrelevant in the age of amazon and froogle. I recognized some clearance products as being priced higher than they are on amazon, so it was hard for me to get overly tempted in there. The cookware was very well priced though, which I verified when I got home. If you really need some All-Clad or Le Creuset, go down there early tomorrow morning.

I did buy a beautiful Wüsthof 7” Asian chef’s knife for $60, quite a bit cheaper than on amazon. I also bought a few other odds and ends, like nice kitchen shears and a pastry blender. Nevertheless, I think I could have found a better way to spend two hours of a beautiful day than wrestling with a bunch of crazed housewives just to save $20.

Incidentally, I’m curious to see how well the Panhandler will fare on East 8th Street, which is really a shopping no-man’s-land. I can barely tolerate walking one block on 8th, and I’m certainly not going there to shop for housewares. Maybe things are looking up for that block, though, especially now that ‘wichcraft has opened.