The geezer express

I love the current resurgence of "wayfarer" frames for sunglasses, and I adore them in white. They're right up there with famous fashion don'ts of historical proportions -- like white belts for men in the 1970s and white go-go boots in the 1960s. Sometimes fashion is so terrible, you have to own it. And I want these white wayfarers on my shelf. They look dated even now. Just imagine how archaic they'll look when I wear them in the year 2036!

But that's not what this post is about. I ordered them from Amazon for the princely sum of $4.28, and it said "free delivery" too. I thought that was bizarre. How can you sell something this cheaply and deliver it for free? And then I received the shipping confirmation email, which said they'd arrive sometime between July 10 and July 28. So it'll take somewhere between three and six weeks to receive them.

I stared at the delivery date and thought, "Well, they've finally gone and done it. Someone has mobilized the shuffling old men wandering around aimlessly on the street corners of every city in America. That's how my glasses will get to me. They'll be passed along by hand, old man to old man, from street corner to street corner. I figure using this method, it probably takes a couple of hours for them to move the glasses a distance of one city block. Given a couple of months, though, these old guys are gonna get my glasses to me. Pronto.

Okay, so in reality the glasses are coming from China. How does it make economic sense for a pair of sunglasses to generate a mere $4.28 for a company, when that same company then has to ship them around the world?

I don't like that, so I'm going to forget I ever heard about the China connection. It's old men that will bring my new wayfarers to me. Good, solid old men. I'm so glad they finally found work.