You have 30-60 minutes to kill with a slew of stores in front of you. Do you like clothes? Housewares? Food? Department? You’re not going to buy anything, just looky-loo some time away.
***What two stores do you most like putzing around in? ***
For me, it’s Tractor Supply Co. and Lowe’s.
i would choose Williams Sonoma or Sur La Table (kitchen stuff). Or a department store with a china department so i could look at beautiful dishes and crystal. I love that stuff.
ETA: A store that’s on my bucket list to visit is the Vermont Country Store. I have ordered from their catalog for years.
Here’s a surprising kind of store that I like to wander around - dollar stores. I like to look for cheap things to put into my boxes of Christmas presents for my grandnephews and grandnieces. The presents I give to each family of grandnephews and grandnieces (there are two or three kids in each family, and I always give the presents to all of them in one family in one box) consist of one or two dozen little things. They include cheap copies of classic children’s books, interesting little toys, books with introductions to things like origami and moiré patterns, cheap game boards and instructions for games like chess or mancala, cheap little science experiments, simple magic tricks, and random other fascinating things. Sometimes I find such things in dollar stores (and sometimes I don’t, and I don’t feel any compulsion to buy if I don’t). Here’s an example of something I found ridiculously cheap - the Magic Djinn. I bought three of them, and the price worked out to $4.42 including sales tax for each of them:
If there’s a food store I don’t go to very often; that’s my first choice. The second is one with men’s shirts, as I have a weakness for nice shirts.
Used book store if there’s one around. Otherwise, I hope I brought my Kindle 'cause I’m not the browsing type.
Sur la Table or Kitchen Kaboodle or Williams-Sonoma or the Le Crueset outlet store.
Hardware store.
I’m sure I could blow all sorts of time in a Costco. The difficult part is leaving without buying anything.
If a store of that scope is cheating, let’s go with Barnes & Noble for Store #1 and either Micro Center or Fry’s as Store #2.
Bookstore, Office Supply store, Hardware store, general-purpose department store, crafts supply store, in about that order. “Dollar” stores are also loads of fun!
Cars(dot)com.
Definitely Bull Moose—a Maine chain that sells music, movies, video games, books, and other sundries. They usually have a section of books for 25¢ each, and often beat the national chains on video game prices.
If I’m in the Augusta area, there’s a locally-owned store downtown that sells video games, from Atari and NES to the newest of the new. I can’t not go in that store if I’m in the area.
Used to be bookstores. But there are none left, at least around where I live, so I no longer do any putzing around in stores.
Place near me called “Reverse Garbage”. They gather industrial discards and assorted junk and sell it for art/hobby/whatever purposes. The place is an Aladdin’s Cave to someone like me. I can spend hours in there just dreaming about what I could build with this or that.
Book store or hardware store. A tech store if nothing else is there.
The AT&T store is fun to browse. Looking at phones.
Pier One Imports, or Penzey’s (spice shop)
Books, absolutely, if a bookstore can ever be found anymore these days. If there are no books, then recorded music—oh wait, that’s fallen by the wayside too—then dresses, shoes, scarves, or jewelry.
Any bookstore.
Big-box hardware store. I rarely leave empty-handed.
Tuesday Morning.
They have beef jerky, dark chocolate. And a bunch of closeouts.
If I’m not going to buy? Probably a jewelry store. As long as it sells the bright, colorful kind of jewelry.