You're Ruining Our Rep

I've talked about this before, but I always get annoyed when news stations camp out in the shovel aisle of the local hardware store waiting for the first snow of the season. Sure, it's an easy story to throw together and I get they just want to kill three minutes of the broadcast without actually doing much work. Trust me, if the last year of doing this blog has taught me anything it's that it's not easy to come up with something different to talk about each day. Still, the fact that we have to see the same story every single year bores me. This season we'd been able to avoid it for a lot longer, because we've had a very mild fall. That just meant the stations were desperate to cover this story, so any amount of snowfall was going to be news.

Saturday night we were scheduled for the first snow of the season, an overnight deal that would net us a few inches of powder. (We ended up getting only a couple inches of light, fluffy snow. It was barely anything, and because it was already warming by early morning I didn't have to shovel at all. My neighbor, on the other hand, felt the need to break out the snow blower at 8 o'clock in the morning. It's going to be a long winter living next to that guy.) However, the fact that there could be snow at all meant the news trucks were at Home Depot and one woman, who was very happy to be on camera, was going over all the things she had to buy - she was getting a new shovel, 3 bags of rock salt and various tools for spreading that rock salt. Again, I'll ask: what do you do with this stuff after last winter? Also, it's two inches of snow. Clearly this lady is overreacting. C'mon, we're New Englanders - we play golf in two inches of snow. Suck it up lady, you're making us look bad.

It also made me worry for this woman in everyday life. If she's running out to overstock for a small storm at the very beginning of winter, what does she do when there are actual emergencies to be found? Does she over-buy thing if, for example, her daughter is due to have a baby or are her fears strictly weather-based? If in February we're looking down the barrel of a severe blizzard, will that just overwhelm her to the point that emergency services are going to have to bust down her door, only to find her in a catatonic state, surrounded by 400 bags of rock salt? This report has left me with more questions than answers. Just another reason I hate the annual "At the hardware store watching people buying shovels" story.