Sometimes I feel guilty for shopping online...

For Baby Ripples birthday I wanted to get her a trampoline or a small bounce house to put in the playroom.  If I couldn't find one that I liked or could afford, I was thinking of getting a water table for the patio.

I looked online but didn't find anything that really jumped out at me or that I thought was a great deal.  I used to love shopping.  With having two young kids, I've turned to shopping online a lot because its easier.  But then I start to feel bad about shopping online.  There's not really that many local toy stores around here, so if I'm going to shop at a chain store I should at least go to the store and support local workers, right?

So my husband and I went to Toys R' Us.  I had a coupon and a small gift card to use towards Baby Ripples' gift.  We found a water table we really liked and I took the tag up to customer service to have them get it.  It was sold out, so the cashier actually went onto the Toys R' Us website to see if she could find it and couldn't.  We picked a different tag for a different water table.  And guess what? It was sold out too.  She could order it for us from the Toys R' Us website but we'd have to pay shipping.

I was so annoyed.  We wasted an hour of our date time to go to the store to buy a gift and they were just going to order it from their website?  And still charge me shipping?  I asked for them to ship it to the store for free and I would pick it up but was told they weren't able to.  I could have saved myself an hour and just ordered it online myself.

I told the cashier that if I had to order online anyways, I would order it from somewhere that would give me free shipping.  We also had picked out another toy for Baby Ripples while we were there but it didn't cost enough for me to be able to use my coupon.   So we left without buying anything.

I ended up finding a nicer water table on a different website for less and they offered free shipping to the store.  We'll just have to pick it up when it arrives.