(Note that this might not make much sense to anyone who hasn’t lived in New England.)<\/p>\n
When I was growing up in Massachusetts, I used to hate going to Building #19<\/a> with my mom. Building #19 is a chain of stores in New England that sells heavily discounted items; it sells overstock, clearance items, damaged goods, and liquidated inventory from failed stores. It even sells food that’s a bit past the sell-by date. It basically sells a lot of junk, and you never really know what you’re going to find at any individual Building #19 store. It is not comparable to any stores I’ve seen in California. Dollar stores don’t come close.<\/p>\n I didn’t like it as a kid since it had few toys, if any (possibly that’s because Child World\/Children’s Palace<\/a> was still in business and in the area at the time), although they seem to have a somewhat better selection now. Over my past few visits to Massachusetts, though, I’ve developed a new appreciation for the stores. Each store is full of cartoons drawn by Mat Brown and Bill White (who even run a Building #19 cartooning class<\/a>) utilizing a distinctive style of self-deprecating humor. I confess that I think the illustrated Building #19 advertisements influenced me (particularly the lettering style).<\/p>\n I was at one today, and an announcement over the PA system interrupted the store music with the message:<\/p>\n \nBuilding #19: Where else can you get a free cup of coffee? If you find a freer cup of coffee anywhere in New England, we’ll reward you with a second cup and immediately lower our price.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Note that this might not make much sense to anyone who hasn’t lived in New England.) When I was growing up in Massachusetts, I used to hate going to Building #19 with my mom. Building #19 is a chain of stores in New England that sells heavily discounted items; it sells overstock, clearance items, damaged […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}