Tik Mak Shu

Imagine living in a country where all the signage was new: ვცხოვრობ პურ-ყველის გამო. Where do you even start to make sense of the built environment? I guess you'd start by looking for similar glyphs on shop-fronts ვცხოვრობ პურ-ყველის გამო I've colored the O and V letters in the Georgian phrase in the first sentence. I remember sitting in a harborside cafe in Greece and sounding out φαρμακείο:  Ph - a - r - m - a - k - é - i - o . . . oh! Pharmacy, that's where I need to go for more sunscreen. We are blessed to live in a multicultural society, and we should cut the New Irish some slack in navigating their new home. Waterford would be a poor place without pierogi, pizza and paratha. 

A few years ago, a young Georgian friend [prev] of the family sent The Beloved a txt announcing that she'd bought something nice in Tik Mak Shu. It took a while to twig that the mystery shop was a wayward transliteration of TK-Maxx (shop?) which operates on the slogan Get big brand wins at small prices. 

Some members of my family have bought into that pitch and in their company I have been inside several of Mr Maxx's emporiums. I wonder / wander around the homewares looking for even one win at a small price. What I see are ranks of tasteless tat which an enthusiast from Marketing has persuaded Product Development will be an End of Year Bonus winner.

Sadly not. If that EYBW had been a success, containers of unsellable product wouldn't have been shipped to TKM for ignominious disposal. It's hard to compare, because TKM stock leans to peculiar [as L - does any of that look remotely useful?], but none of it looks cheap. But in most cases, you could get something with more functionality, less bling/blurgh, for the same money in a regular department store.

William Morris is the chap to guide us here "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful"