Consumer Education: A Guide to Buying Hard Goods and Some Shit

In today’s fast-paced world, it’s easy to drown in the shitty seas of capitalism while trying to purchase frivolous items needed to contain our boredom between eating, shitting and fucking. Basically, that’s what we are all on this planet to do, right? Eat, shit, fuck. The rest is just killing time between the next fabulous meal and all three at the same time if you’re lucky.

Some people evaporate their spare time by riding on skateboards, a noble hobby, one might say. The following advice is dispensed free of charge to all consumers of all hobbies courtesy of SLUG and a skateboard merchant being me. However, this advice may transcend to any kind of shopping for any frivolous purchase and thus is not limited to the realm of purchasing skateboarding hard goods.

I call it the “rebound test,” and it was first bestowed upon me by my great friend Tim, who is an anti-capitalistic anarchist headquartered amongst hippies and hooligans in a soggy state in the great Northwest. He showed me the methods needed to accurately purchase the right skateboard goods to further enhance my experiences rolling around meaninglessly in existence.

Now, right before the big skateboard boom of the late 90s, me and Tim used to brave the streets of downtown SLC dodging biker cops and hostile jocks looking to turn meaningless curbs into implements of art and fun, occasionally breaking a bearing or a kingpin being forced to purchase one in order to continue our mutual paths of destruction. Thus leading us to the first step.

The first step in accurately activating the rebound test is to find a skateboard merchant who doesn’t know a skateboard from his own butt hole. This is easier than one might think. Just go to Zummiz or Dicks Sports in the Gateway or any other store that doesn’t advertise with SLUG Magazine and you’ll be sure to find a douchebag behind the counter. If they have big boobs, that usually means they don’t know what they are doing as well.

Step two is to ask kindly to see a pair of trucks or a set of wheels or any other product you might want to check the rebound on. Any skater knows that the higher the rebound of a skateboard product, the better it will perform, right? So nicely ask the merchant how the product rebounds.

Step three: When the merchant tells you that they don’t know the rebound potential of the given product, but insures you that it’s the best cuz it’s what the last five buddies’ mommies ended up buying, throw the product as HARD as you can on the ground and see for yourself how it rebounds. (Skateboard wheels have an exceptionally high rebound rate, so do some shoes.)

See how many products you can rebound before the merchant realizes that instead of folding shirts with bullshit logos on them into eye-friendly rectangles, they will have to track down all the rebounded items scattered across the corporate concrete floor of a skateboard mega chain. Usually at Zummiz, I’ll get about five items deep before they ask me to buy something or leave.

But like I mentioned earlier, the rebound test is not limited to just skateboard products; get creative! Try it on cologne salespeople and other worthless retailers. Trust me, it will help you shop smarter, and in today’s economy, that’s important. For questions or comments regarding this test or if you need tips for your shopping habits, contact Mike Brown at mikebrown048@hotmail.com.

Some Shit that Happened on a Skateboard Update List By Broadie Hammers

1. Old Dirty Hads cut his hair, thus losing “Dirty” status and is back to being Sean Hadley.
2. Oliver Buchanan is in that funny TV commercial for the Sony PS2 thing, but his hair doesn’t look very red.
3. Adam “Try it” Dyet won everything at the Phoenix Am last month. Best trick? Nollie 360 heelflip boardslide. This guy isn’t going places; he’s already there.
4. Lizard King has a big fan club in Phoenix and ended up getting paid for oiling onto a car while down there. 5. Salty Peaks game of skate contest May 28.
6. Transworld contest at Binary May 7.
7. Robin Baker is the best skater from the SLC; don’t believe me? Fuck you. Watch the curtains drop in Seasons No. 2.
8. We all know that T-Bone is good at skateboarding; does he have to keep reminding us? Any shit you need to talk about or let SLUG readers know about?