With no end in site to Lorena’s new (to us) furniture refurbishing projects and her fervor to do them, we decided to buy her a new hand sander. We looked on line at both Walmart and Amazon and, again, Amazon was not even close. This time we would have had to pay a 30% premium for the privilege of buying the closest equivalent at Avalon to what was offered by Walmart. to buy from Amazon. There was not really a whole lot of difference in the offerings. The specs are below. We had two ways to get the sander in our hands from Walmart: 1) Pick it up at our local Walmart which we drive by several times per week or 2) make a purchase of $35 which we needed to do (sand paper and some other supplies) for the project whichever choice we made. Amazon had a one day shipping for Prime members, which is additional cost, but that we have. We called it a wash on that, too.
| Feature/Item | Walmart | Amazon |
| Product | Hyper Tough 2.4Amp Random Orbit Sander | Black & Decker BDERO100 Random Orbit Sander, 5-Inch |
| Current rating | 2.4 Amps | 2.0 Amps |
| Shipping | 2 days (w/$35 purchase) | 1 day with Prime membership |
| Price | $18.73 |
$26.99 |
We have been members of Amazon Prime for a number of years now. Amazon is convenient and has good prices. So, when Lorena returned from IKEA a couple of weeks ago, disappointed by what she believed were low quality offerings at not such great prices, we decided to buy a bed from Amazon. We found something that would just fit the bill: A 
We were sad when one of this summers frequent thunderstorms took out part of our persimmon tree, but it all came out well because it gave Christian and I a chance to buy some new tools down at the Walmart Garden Center. Christian is not quite a logger yet, but he is much closer than yesterday. It would have been more fun if we would have had something more powerful than a pruning saw and lopper.