seriously, there are like fifteen different brands at target

My husband and I are in the midst of buying a television, and it’s proving extraordinarily difficult, mostly because neither of us knows very much about televisions at all. 

We’ve made other major purchases without much difficulty.  We each helped each other buy cars last year (his job was to know stuff about cars and my job was to go along with him to the dealerships and look sour and tell the salesmen I didn’t like the cars so they would ratchet down the price), and it worked very well.  It wasn’t that bad.  We wanted American cars because we’re poor.  We wanted good mileage.  I wanted a sedan, he wanted a coupe.  We wanted to spend about $5000 each.  Both times, the requirements narrowed the options down almost all the way, and then Joe did the rest of the deciding.

I am slightly more conversant in technology than he is, and I usually take care of the tech purchases.  But computers are easy for me to pick—“What’s the least expensive thing on the Apple refurb store that’s not a MacBook Air?”   (Not really—I do know about different specs and whatnot, but for my purposes, the least fancypants machine is always all I need.)  And I’ve been successful enough with the Kindle and the Wii and our iPods, but again, those are easy purchases without much competition.  (We weren’t about to pay for a PS3 or a 360 back then, I hate Barnes & Noble with a flaming passion, and hahaha people pretend that there’s any real competition for iPods ha.)

But televisions!  What a bizarre world.  There’s all these options.  And, I mean, the differences are pretty easy to understand, but when I try to research whether I actually need these features, I come up with oodles and oodles of Crazy-Tech-Nerd stuff that just makes fun of me because I don’t want to spend more than my rent on a television set.  (We went to Best Buy—not to purchase, because we don’t like spending an extra hundred bucks for no reason, but for research purposes—and when my husband told the previously super-attentive employee the price range we were looking at, the Best Buy guy pretty much walked away.) 

And of course, there’s always the fact that ten minutes after Joe makes his decision, he goes back on it and refuses to buy anything at all.  This is gonna be a long process.