Shoppers, beware!

Beware, shoppers at Elkjøp Sarpsborg!

No, don’t worry too much… Nothing wrong with the store, the people who work there or the products they sell. The trouble starts when you leave their store…

We were there on the 26th, to purchase a Sony Home Theatre System (consisting of a BDP-S350 & HT-FS1). This is one of the first (affordable) Blu-Ray systems on the market here, to my knowledge. But enough about that. I was going to come with a rant about Elkjøp Sarpsborg here, not brag about our new HTS.

The problem in my particular case was that I was carrying an over-sized box which weighted about 20 kgs (44 lbs) and could not see where I was going. That is to say, the view forward was fine. The view of what was in front of my feet was the problem. In the past, this store has been burgled a couple of times by thieves who rammed the door and/or the windows of the store with a large car/truck and then gave themselves a nice ‘five finger discount‘. To prevent this from happening anymore, the store has these stub metal poles, about 30 cms (1 foot) high at set distances along the entire storefront, including a couple in front of the door. One of these happened to be in my (huge) blind spot, and before I knew what hit me (well, technically what I had hit…) the box went airborne and I crashed down on a knee… 🙁
Luckily the Sony system was packed with lots of packing material and survived the fall without any damage. The same could not be said of my pants. A good thing is that they had a double layer covering my knees (of which only 1 layer tore), so no worries about infections etc.
My knee still hurts like hell after 3 days, and I hope no permanent damage was done. I will give it until a week has gone by, and then check in with a doctor…

My point here should be obvious… who on Earth came with the ‘bright’ idea of putting a barricade like this in front of the door opening?? And how many more people have to fall and break their purchases/limbs before someone comes to their senses here…?