Nail Shoppe

In case anyone hasn't seen the clip of comedienne Anjelah Johnson talking about her visit to the nail salon, I highly recommend you go look it up on YouTube, like, now. (Unless you're at work, and, like me, have no speakers on your computer - it loses something without the sound.)

So yesterday, I had a few hours between work and rehearsal, but didn't want to spend the majority of it in rush hour traffic to go home and back, so I just hung around down here, to look for that perfect pair of white peep-toe pumps/strappy sandals for summer. All shoe-vending stores were a bust - there was a cute pair of kitten-heeled flip-flops in a really soft white leather, but that isn't really the look I'm going for here... but I digress. So finding myself with some extra time to kill, I decided to go get a pedicure, in much the same way that some people would use their lunch breaks to go get a new tattoo.

I went to a nail place I'd never been to before, but, much like Starbucks, they're really all the same: Vietnamese women who probably don't have greencards, who probably don't get paid enough to touch people's gross feet all day, and who all have the incredible ability to shamelessly upsell, upsell, upsell. Stupidly, I let this one upsell me from "pedicure" to "spa pedicure"; usually I'm pretty good about just saying no, but yesterday, for some reason, she caught me off guard.

What I want to know is what happened to the spa pedicure? What am I really getting for my extra $5? In the good old days of yore (when I was in college), a spa pedicure meant not only sitting in the massage chair, but also getting a peppermint foot mask, paraffin dip, or sea salt scrub. Now it appears to be just the chair. I have a massage chair at home, people; if you're going to upsell me something, upsell me something I can't do myself, like the flowah that I now have to specifically request every time I go for a pedicure, because apparently it's not worth upselling anymore. Also, the chair is loud, and makes it even harder for me to understand what my pedicurist is saying to me, as if I don't already feel bad enough for not understanding her accent.

Le sigh.