Back in August I visited Ten Ichi Mart on Smith Street on Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, with a friend. I had not gone in planning to purchase anything, but I ended up leaving with two Miya brand tea cups with snowmen on them, pictured below:
In order to understand why I went from not having planned to buy any cups to purchasing two snowman cups, you will need to look closely at the cups. They may look identical to the untrained eye, but there is a subtle, significant difference which resulted in my spending approximately $40 instead of $20.
The cup that first caught my attention was the one on the left. That snowman has a little smile.
Something about the snowman appealed to me, so I decided to purchase it after confirming that it was not unreasonably expensive. On first glance, I thought the cups were identical, but for some reason I looked closer and noticed that the snowman on the second cup was not smiling. It has a blank expression.
(Note that I discovered on closer inspection that there are plenty of other differences in the snowmen, but the first one I noticed was the expression.)
This second snowman tugged at the heart-strings. He looked like he would be sad if I only purchased his cheery friend and left him alone in Ten Ichi Mart. There was no way I could do that. One could suggest that I could have purchased the heart-string snowman and left the happy one for someone else to buy. But I could hardly pull the rug out from under the happy snowman.
Thus, I now have two hand-painted snowman cups.
Not long after, I continued the snowman purchasing theme with an Usaburo snowman figure, which you can read about in my next post.
