For various reasons, I recently got a hankering to mess with a Rubik’s Cube. Now I’ve owned them in the past, but can’t find any of them. My brother had them too, but he can’t find his. The only cube I could find was a little keychain model that is extremely hard to rotate and use. Clearly, I needed a new cube.
Now you wouldn’t think this would be tough. I mean, it’s a Rubik’s Cube. They sell them everywhere right? Well it seems that after what I went through, they are practically off the market.
So first I checked in a little department store. I was already there and knew that they had a toy section. I went to find that the section was about 1/3 the size it was a few years ago, and it had no Rubik’s Cubes (or other puzzles from what I saw).
Next up was a Target Super Store. Such a big Target would have a simple little Rubik’s Cube, right? Well I checked the toy isles a couple of times and was completely unable to find it. There was a blank space where it might have been, but without a label there I don’t know if they were just sold out.
So next I checked a nearby drug store. They have a fair group of simple toys. They had cap guns, caps, Magic 8 Balls (which everywhere I went had), Uno decks (everyone has these too), and many other things. But not what I wanted.
I finally went to Toys-R-Us, a place I really don’t like. It’s amazing just how far that store has gone downhill, not just since I was a little kid, but in the last 5 years or so too. They’ve reorganized the store, as they always do between my visits, so I had to cruise the whole store looking for the things. I finally found the section that should have had it (board games and puzzles) and… it wasn’t there. Uno was there in a couple of varieties. There were three kinds of Magic 8 Balls. No big Slinkies, but there were at least 50 mini-Slinkies. You’d think they’d have one cube here, but there wasn’t even space for it.
So I went and asked, and the guy lead me straight to them. They have a couple of different kinds. They have the classic, the 5×5x5 cubes, the 2×2 cubes, some other variety of 3×3x3 cubes I’ve never see, and the little keychain cubes. They are all together at the end of an isle… in the middle of the video game section. Just where you’d expect them.
So after all that (and a long wait in line, because despite 6-10 checkout lanes there were only two people working the registers)… I got my cube.
If you manage to actually buy one without going on-line, there is an excellent solutions guide called The Rubik’s Cube Solution.
