That line about your old candy thermometer drifting 25 degrees off hit home because I read somewhere that most cheap dial thermometers can be off by 20 degrees either way right out of the box. That kind of gap is the whole ballgame with frying, since 350 and 375 give you totally different crusts. I just use a $20 instant read now and check it against boiling water once in a while, works fine and hasn't lied to me yet.

Did they at least wrap it with a receipt so you could return it yourself? You're not rude, you're just saving everyone the trip to a store that doesn't exist anymore.

Ever try running a shop where the wifi dies right when a group of 5 walks in? That was me last month, not a full outage but the signal kept dropping every 10 minutes. I ended up using my phone as a hotspot for two hours and burned through half my data. The scary part was my card reader kept trying to reconnect to the dead router instead of the hotspot, so I had to manually switch it each time. Now I just leave a cheap prepaid sim in an old phone as my backup. It's not fancy but it beats losing sales while you mess with cables.