The other day in this item, I pointed you all towards an unusual item being sold over on the Costco website. The link no longer works so I'm now getting e-mails from folks asking what the hell it was I wanted you to see there.
They were selling an original Picasso crayon sketch…and not a very good one. It was priced at $39,999.99 because, after all, who'd pay $40,000 for something like that?
I find two things especially amusing about this, one being that the Costco site is set up for multiple quantities. You not only could order the original Picasso sketch online, you could have specified that you wanted two or ten or fifty of them added to your shopping cart.
And the second thing is to wonder about the route by which a Picasso sketch winds up being sold by Costco. I mean, if I had one and I wanted to sell it, I don't think it would occur to me to say, "Hey, how about that store where I bought that case of toilet paper?" Or imagine it from Costco's point-of-view. They have buyers who sit there all day and the phone rings and they say, "You have how many truckloads of Arm & Hammer Baking Soda? Okay, if you can come up with another 200,000 units and make delivery by August 1, it's a deal." Then the guy gets another call and he says, "What? Original Picasso sketch? No, we aren't overstocked with them. Hmm…how many thousand units you got of them? Oh, you just have the one sketch? Well, we don't usually deal in…oh, what the hell. Sure, we'll sell that. Maybe we can work up some sort of package deal…you know, shrink-wrap it with ten pounds of Cascade Dishwashing Detergent…"
Sounds silly, I guess. But the Picasso is no longer on the Costco site so I guess they sold it. Let me know if you see any Chagalls over there…or maybe a closeout on Matisses. Also, I'm just about out of Windex.