They also snob

The only person who likes a snob is either the snob herself or a fellow snob. At my circle we're pretty much all snobs so we tend to get along pretty well in the main.

My subject today is a "craft store" whose name, other than to tell you it's Michaels, shall remain nameless.

I refer principally to an incident that happened about a year ago, when my daughter, whom I'd just taught to knit, came home for Thanksgiving during her sophomore year in college up in Yankeeland (where, I admit, they often have a deeper appreciation for knitting, or at least for wool) with a newly made, apparently errorless scarf. I even mentioned it in a previous story here.


What I didn't mention was that I asked her, as you would have, what the yarn was and where she got it. It was, I think, a blend of mostly acrylic. Fine. I have no beef with acrylic. I don't use it usually except for things that are going to get frequent use by someone under 18 months, but that's just a matter of my personal wool worship. I understand this to be a matter of taste.

But then she told me she got the yarn at Michaels. (Pardon the absence of the apostrophe but so it appears to be in the original. I cannot help but think that several Michaels own the store. It is patently untrue that the store's only inventory is people named Michael.)

When she said the word, I wrinkled my nose. I protest that I did so not out of pure personal snobbery, but out of something of a collective judgment. For the people I knit with, the action is part of the pronunciation of the name. It's like this: "Michaels" -- half pause -- nose wrinkle.

This could be because I knit with these people in a yarn store, whose livelihood depends in some respects on customers' judgment that their favorite yarn is in some way superior to Caron® One Pound®. Whatever the reason, we consider ourselves too good for the likes of a concern that sells mediocre greeting cards and plastic giraffes among other "TONS OF GIFTS UNDER $5." In fact, I don't think most knitters like to think in terms of tons of anything, unless it is perhaps tons of musk oxen with their annual output of .08 ounces of qiviut.

So yes, we are smugly satisfied that our yarn is better than that. I imagine we secretly believe that if we bought a mass of Red Heart Designer Sport at our home store it would acquire a patina of elegance compared to the same yarn at Michaels. But my store doesn't sell Red Heart, so I'll never know.

Right now I'm on a Shetland kick. In the last few months I've been trying to convince some folks in Scotland to send me a yarn sample card. They promised me they'd do it about three months ago, and again about three weeks ago, but, you know, they just haven't yet. They may just be over there wrinkling up their collective Scotts noses when they hear I'm an American.

It's disgusting how some people can be such snobs.