Off beat: Chair is an oasis of serenity in cacophony of shopping hubbub

‘Shop till you drop” isn’t just a figure of speech these days.

Most people wait until they get home before crashing on the couch. But some exhausted shoppers were nodding off this weekend in a local music store.

The focus of all the slumbering action — if that’s the right word — is a leather chair right in the middle of Beacock Music.

To be fair, it’s a fantastic chair. “Overstuffed” barely describes it. The faded brown leather is soft and inviting.

It’s a magnet for fatigued shoppers, as well as nonmusical people resting while their spouses shop for trombones or guitar strings or sheet music.

As one tone-deaf husband yielded to the temptation Saturday, salesman Wayne Thompson offered a bit of advice: “Be careful in that chair.”

And to the obvious question — Why? — he replied, “People have been falling asleep.”

The count was up to five after just a day or so of post-Thanksgiving shopping.

“They think they’ll just sit down and read the paper,” Thompson said. Eventually, a salesman might have to come over and interrupt the nap and ask if the snoozer is supposed to be someplace — picking up the kids at the movie maybe, or meeting someone for lunch.

The chair worked its sleepy-time charms on three people Friday, he said. That’s understandable, because some customers had been shopping since midnight at “Black Friday” door-buster sales.

But that doesn’t explain Saturday. Two more people had dozed off in the chair by noon, Gayle Beacock said.

She bought the chair for her own place, then moved it into the store’s acoustic guitar room to provide a homey touch. When they expanded the guitar inventory for the holidays, the chair went into the main part of the store, near the coffee bar.

The shop doesn’t strike you as a great place to nod off, by the way.

“It is so loud,” Thompson said, and it’s not lullaby stuff.

No soothing sounds of the Christmas season: The only “Drummer Boy” there Saturday was a rockster working up a sweat on a drum kit.

Maybe it’s a commentary on our fast-paced lives, or maybe it’s a fluke.

And maybe, Thompson muses, something else will happen. Let’s say a guy is looking at electric guitars.

After 40 years of humming “Help Me, Rhonda,” he’s ready to unleash his inner Beach Boy. So he walks over to his wife, who is oh-so-snuggy in the chair, and asks if he could finally buy a Fender.

She doesn’t say no.

Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story, or just tell a story.