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The Dinnerware Hunt is Now Complete!
Jun. 12th, 2022 09:31 amMonths ago Hawk and I decided to replace our dinner plates. The black rectangular Japanese-inspired plates we'd had for umpteen years had served us well; but we were ready for something new. We saw an attractive dark-blue pattern of well-made plates at HomeGoods, a chain discount store, and started buying them.
I say started buying because HomeGoods, which is a brand of TJX (along with TJ Maxx, Marshall's, and one or two others), doesn't sell things like this in full sets. It sells them piecemeal. And any one store might have only a few scattered pieces, or possibly none at all. Thus we started The Hunt.
The Hunt began in February. We saw a few of the plates in one store and started buying them. In one weekend we visited no fewer than eight TJX stores. We found enough new plates to begin using them... but not enough to make a full set.
The Hunt continued over the next several weeks. Two weeks later we crawled through another 8 or so stores. By that point we'd visited every store within a 30 mile radius, several of them twice. We had enough pieces to donate our old set... but not enough to complete the new set. So we kept hunting.
We searched online for The Hunt, too. Unfortunately TJX doesn't really do online. And the manufacturer, a regular dinnerware company in Portugal, has a poor website. Even in Portuguese. It seemed the plates we were buying may have been a "last season", discontinued line. So we also shopped places like eBay... where we did find enough pieces to complete our set, but at exorbitant prices. Sellers were asking 2-3x the retail prices at HomeGoods, plus another 2x for shipping. We didn't want to pay 4-5x while dealing with the risks of buying online from internet randos!
Incidentally a colleague of mine worked at TJX corporate HQ before joining my company. When I asked him if it was possible to search inventory online he chuckled and explained that The Hunt is exactly what TJX executives want their customers to do. Their go-to-market strategy is to get customers intrigued by what they see in one store, but there's only 1 or 2 in that store, so they go to more stores to shop, and on each visit they make more spur-of-the-moment purchases.
So what did we do? We kept hunting. We visited TJX stores in other cities when we traveled. Las Vegas. Bakersfield. Fresno. Other than finding one coffee/soup mug in Vegas we came up empty handed. The scattered inventory that stores had in February was all played out by April. We gave up.
And then... just yesterday Hawk visited a HomeGoods and saw more plates. The Hunt was on again!
She bought a stack of bowls plus a few small plates to fill out our set. When she got them home, though, we discovered they were different. The pattern was the same, but the small plates were marginally larger and the bowls were shallower. "No problem," we figured, "If we can find more like these we'll just complete our set with them." So we visited another HomeGoods together in the evening... and found pieces matching the originals!
So, now we've got our full set. Plus a stack of alternate bowls. We've tucked those away to use for serving bowls maybe, or as fallbacks in case too many of the regular bowls break. As long as The Hunt has taken to get to this point, we've purposefully overbought to have backups on hand!
Continued in next blog: It's a Bowl, It's a Plate. It's a... Blate!
I say started buying because HomeGoods, which is a brand of TJX (along with TJ Maxx, Marshall's, and one or two others), doesn't sell things like this in full sets. It sells them piecemeal. And any one store might have only a few scattered pieces, or possibly none at all. Thus we started The Hunt.
The Hunt began in February. We saw a few of the plates in one store and started buying them. In one weekend we visited no fewer than eight TJX stores. We found enough new plates to begin using them... but not enough to make a full set.
The Hunt continued over the next several weeks. Two weeks later we crawled through another 8 or so stores. By that point we'd visited every store within a 30 mile radius, several of them twice. We had enough pieces to donate our old set... but not enough to complete the new set. So we kept hunting.
We searched online for The Hunt, too. Unfortunately TJX doesn't really do online. And the manufacturer, a regular dinnerware company in Portugal, has a poor website. Even in Portuguese. It seemed the plates we were buying may have been a "last season", discontinued line. So we also shopped places like eBay... where we did find enough pieces to complete our set, but at exorbitant prices. Sellers were asking 2-3x the retail prices at HomeGoods, plus another 2x for shipping. We didn't want to pay 4-5x while dealing with the risks of buying online from internet randos!
Incidentally a colleague of mine worked at TJX corporate HQ before joining my company. When I asked him if it was possible to search inventory online he chuckled and explained that The Hunt is exactly what TJX executives want their customers to do. Their go-to-market strategy is to get customers intrigued by what they see in one store, but there's only 1 or 2 in that store, so they go to more stores to shop, and on each visit they make more spur-of-the-moment purchases.
So what did we do? We kept hunting. We visited TJX stores in other cities when we traveled. Las Vegas. Bakersfield. Fresno. Other than finding one coffee/soup mug in Vegas we came up empty handed. The scattered inventory that stores had in February was all played out by April. We gave up.
And then... just yesterday Hawk visited a HomeGoods and saw more plates. The Hunt was on again!
She bought a stack of bowls plus a few small plates to fill out our set. When she got them home, though, we discovered they were different. The pattern was the same, but the small plates were marginally larger and the bowls were shallower. "No problem," we figured, "If we can find more like these we'll just complete our set with them." So we visited another HomeGoods together in the evening... and found pieces matching the originals!
So, now we've got our full set. Plus a stack of alternate bowls. We've tucked those away to use for serving bowls maybe, or as fallbacks in case too many of the regular bowls break. As long as The Hunt has taken to get to this point, we've purposefully overbought to have backups on hand!
Continued in next blog: It's a Bowl, It's a Plate. It's a... Blate!
