SALE BOAT.(shopping at Target's temporary store at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan)

There could hardly be any news more thrilling to discount-minded Manhattanites, whose bargain-hunting triumphs are usually on the order of buying a couple of bags of postholiday candy at Duane Reade at fifty per cent off (you've just missed the last of the brown and orange Halloween M&M's, but soon enough there will be half-price Reese's peanut-butter Christmas trees), than that Target has come to town. Manhattan has a lot going for it, but until two weeks ago we didn't have a Target store. And, just like that, Target has already been taken away. The Minneapolis-based store set up shop on a boat at Chelsea Piers for a fortnight that just ended, to test the waters for a possible full-blown store in Manhattan and to give New Yorkers who couldn't make it to Chelsea Piers in time the familiar, nagging feeling that they missed out on something. (Actually, there are Target stores in the New York area, including one in Brooklyn and two in Queens, but we're talking about Manhattan here.)

As a classic Target shopping experience, the Target experiment was a disappointment, because the only goods on offer were ninety-two holiday items. Normally, a Target store--even one not designated a Super Target--has jillions of items for sale, including many things that you need and many more that you don't need but somehow end up buying anyway; because everything is so cheap, you go into a Target intending to spend about twenty dollars, and you leave having spent a hundred and sixty-five. And it is important to go to Target in a car, not by subway or bus: unless you load up your trunk with six or seven Target bags filled with things that you're not sure why you bought, get home and unload them, hoping the neighbors won't see you making several trips back and forth to your car with armloads of stuff, and feel both pleased by your sharp eye for a bargain and slightly ill from a sensation of excess--even if the excess is on a reasonable scale, like paying seven dollars for three twelve-packs of Diet Coke when you need (and have room for) only one twelve-pack--you haven't really shopped at Target properly.

At the entrance to the pier where the holiday boat was docked, the red-and-white bull's-eye logo was everywhere, and you could feel yourself becoming more alert and quietly crazy with anticipation, the way your cat looks when it sees a bird on the windowsill. You walked through a series of tents, ...