$300 dollars later...

Yesterday, I spent $300 dollars at the first vacuum store I've ever been to in my life. Now I have seven days to decide if I got a good deal or was just being a sucker (nyuk, nyuk).

I walked into The Vacuum Vendor in south Provo with the intent of getting information about what makes a vacuum good or bad. Our last vacuum came from the DI. Believe it or not, it actually worked for a little while...ish. I could always see little scraps of stuff when I did yoga on our living room floor, but the vacuum was definitely better than nothing. Then we totally broke it while trying to fix it, and now it is not better than nothing.

So, as I was saying, I walked into the Vacuum Vendor and three gentle/salesmen were waiting to wait on me. They pulled out every trick in the book to get me to buy that vacuum. I knew what they were doing, but it was kind of nice. At most of the stores I frequent, I'm lucky if I can find a worker to ask why the store is out of stock of the cheap Kleenexes. So I felt a little fancy.

These are the vacuums I was looking at.


Aren't they beautiful? The vacuum demonstrations were actually very convincing. First the guy showed me how this $600 vacuum has two motors and can vacuum up a whole shoe and still be totally fine. He let me vacuum up the shoe, and then he just pulled it out of the vacuum lickety-split. No burning smell or anything! But the thing that really got me was when he poured pink sand on a black carpet. (Yes, I asked if the pink sand comes with the vacuum cleaner. It doesn't.) He then used a Dyson vacuum, which are supposed to be pretty fancy, to clean up the sand. On the surface, it looked totally clean. But then he used the Vibrance Riccar vacuum. When the vacuum got next to where the sand had been, little pink pieces of sand started jumping up into the air because of the "vibrance" feature. There was still sand in that carpet! and the Riccar uncovered it! It was beautiful. I bought the vacuum.

Now I really do think this is a good product. Our main concern is that the handle is plastic instead of metal, and we've both seen lots of broken handles on vacuums. To return or not to return, that is the question. But if you had seen those sand particles jump, you might be in love like I am.

P.S. Never buy a vacuum at Walmart. Go to a vacuum store. They have similar prices with much higher quality vacuums...or at least I hope they are much higher quality.