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December 13, 2002

Yesterday I finally slapped down a quick and poorly-written piece about the holiday shopping, and how women's clothing comes in too many varieties.  Despite the relatively lackluster presentation, it occasioned a reader mail from Bryan.

I especially enjoyed your take on "Ross and Marshall's" (though around here they're just "Marshall's"). I don't understand why women need all those different choices, or alternatively why these places have those choices and say women need them. I can say, however, that I've worked for the dark side so I understand them now. It's actually a very ingenious system designed to ruin women's self-esteem one small dress size at a time. It's a horrendous thing.

Thankfully, being a guy, I just worked register or the men's department so I didn't have to deal with all that women crap except at recovery time. And then I just memorized which tag numbers went where and if it didn't have a tag I'd just kindly put it back on the recovery rack for one of our female members.

He brings up something I meant to mention yesterday, but forgot to get to. (I told you it was a poorly-done piece.)

Almost every time I go to Ross or Marshall's or TJ Maxx or other such stores, the line to check out is like something out of Dante's Inferno. There is always one register (out of about 12) open, and there's always a woman working it and she's always on the phone or paging someone for a price check the entire time.  And the other people in line are always women, and they're all buying about 17 items, at least 5 of which will have the wrong price tag or no price tag at all or scan up higher than the customer thought it was going to be, causing a big debate which the manager is required to settle.

Usually the manager is standing 15 feet away at the customer service booth, trying to deal with a return on something some idiot bought at an entirely different store.  I don't mean a different Marshall's.  I mean like Kmart, or The Broadway, or Kragen Autoparts.  Despite that small problem, the person is sure they should be able to get their money back for the item.  Like the returns are some sort of check-cashing service, and you can just take in any semi-new garment and get money for it.  After all, Marshall's sells every sort of factor extra and discontinued item one earth, so what's one more?

Usually as you stand in line for literally 10 or 15 minutes the manager or the cashier is constantly picking up the store phone and announcing, "All available cashiers to the front please."

This invariably has all the effect of screaming at the ocean when you want the tide to go out, and no one ever appears.

Last time (before this week) I was at such a store months ago, this whole routine went on for at least twenty minutes, with each person taking 2 or 3 minutes to check out.  Everyone buys like 10 things, and the cashier has to scan them all, and if there's a miracle and they are actually in the computer properly, they still have to fold the items up and put them into a bag.  Then the woman always has to write a check, and is slow about doing it, and can't find her ID.  The whole time the cashier is yelling into the phone, and her voice coming over the intercom, "Becky or Julia, to the front cash registers please."

As I was finally up to the register, both Becky and Julia came waltzing in the front door, with Jack in the Box cups in their hands, clearly back from lunch, or perhaps a snack.  It was about 3pm then, as I recall.

The manager spoke to them as they came in, and they nodded and walked down the long aisle to the rear of the store, where they vanished.  I was there for five more minutes and neither of them ever came back, despite the line behind me being even longer than it was when I got into it earlier.

This is not any sort of unusual circumstance mind you, I've been to those stores a dozen times in the last five years, and probably ten out of the twelve times it's been at least a ten minute wait.

The time to go is definitely a Monday near Xmas, since there were five registers open when I was there this week, and no more than two people in any line.  I got my two items and was out of there almost immediately. So if you have to shop in a discount clothing store and it's say August, try to put it off for five months. 

December 12, 2002

Fit was actually hard to do, since they were either too long in the sleeves or too tight in the shoulders.  I apparently have broader than average shoulders, since most would pinch if I tried to raise my arms.  All of the coats are made for potentially fat consumers as well, since even the smalls (which I could hardly get my arms into) were a lot bigger in the middle than I needed.  I got an XL, but the L fit fine in some other types, while the XL was too large.  Varied between the models.

I still wanted the trench coat.  It looks a lot better in person than in the website picture, really.  Much shinier and blacker; they almost have a dark blue on the website. What I really wanted was the style I got, with this distressed grey leather.  Unfortunately the only thing they have in that style of leather is that one coat, which I didn't want.  I like black, but since everyone has a black leather jacket, and I can't stand anything in brown, and I'd like to be somewhat different than the herd, I like the gray distressed one.  Not enough to get a small motorcycle style jacket though.  I have one now in black, and it's not that comfy or warm.  Plus I don't have a motorcycle, and I'm not getting one any time soon.

I'd post a picture of me in it, but the model there looks a lot better for now.  I've not shaved for several days, and my lower lip is still all swollen and weird.  It scabbed over, and is all dry and cracked like a mud flat.  Every time I take a shower the scabs seem to dissolve and an hour after the shower my lip is throbbing and raw and moist to the touch, like really bad rug burn.  It hurts and itches all the time so I've been putting a Vaseline-based Hydrocortisone ointment on it every hour or two to keep it moist, and a band aid over that.  Still itches and throbs a lot, I can literally take my pulse just sitting or standing still since it's like someone is thumping my chin with every beat.  I almost expect to see my chin visibly throbbing in the mirror, like a speaker with heavy bass pumping. It's getting better though, and my lower lip is hardly swollen tonight.  But I'm still far from photogenic. 

So the leather jacket shopping was fine. I love the actual leather store, since I want just about one of everything there.  The department stores, however, are creepy. I was in a couple of Ross and Marshall's the last few days, and they're even worse than Saks and Neiman-Marcus were.  Not because they have more stuff, just because Ross and Marshall's and other discount clothing stores of their type are huge open buildings, like warehouses.  So you can see the clothing stretching away to infinity, in a Matrix-like "Clothes, lots of clothes." sensation.  At least in the department stores they have little corners for everything and displays and dividers and perfume sections here and there, to break up the endless sprawl of attire.

The sheer overabundance of clothing always puts me off.  The men's departments are huge, but mere thimblefulls next to the ocean that is women's clothing.

I'm so glad I'm not a girl.  There are just way too many things to worry about wearing, and it actually matters what you wear.

Women have to worry about setting just the right tone with their clothing and not being too casual or too slutty or too formal.  They have to do make up and shave their legs and arm pits regularly, they have to worry about a bra that keeps their boobies up enough to look good, but not so much that they're slutty, and they have to worry about their underwear lines, and keeping the ass beneath the underwear in reasonable shape.  Worse yet they have to put up with men all the time staring at them and trying to lay their swollen, grubby paws on them.

And I'm not even mentioning shoes, which are a further nightmare for women.  I own four pairs of shoes; sandals, black sneakers I wear only for work, gray Nike hiking boots I wear most of the rest of the time, black ugly boots I got at Walmart 7 years ago while on a ski trip to Colorado when the boots I'd taken with me proved too thin and slippery for the snow.  I'm not counting house shoes, though I probably should count my Emu boots, imitation Ugg boots, since I wear them about 75% of the time, though just around the house.

So I was in Ross looking for something for a girl I work with.  I thought I might get her some fluffy warm sweat pants, but they didn't have any in the women's section.  Lots of sweats, but all were work out types, and relatively thin.  I'd had the same results looking at sweats at a couple of athletic stores already.  But the men's section as Ross, while 1/10th the size of the women's section (not counting shoes and lingerie, which are 90% women's also) is so much easier to navigate.  Plus they had a bunch of kinds of pants like I was looking for.  Unfortunately they were all huge; XL, XXL, etc.  The entire S size grouping for pants was about 15 garments worth, and very plain stuff.  The M's were about twice the size of the S's, in terms of items on display, but didn't have anything I wanted. L has probably 20x more stuff than S and M put together, and then the XL+ has about as much as L.  So is everyone 2 meters tall and fat now or what?

Of course when I asked an employee about it she said that they don't get many small or medium items in, but when they do they always sell out real fast.  It's such an obvious comment that I hesitate to bother making it, but it has to be asked.  So why the hell don't they order more small and medium if they always sell out so quickly?

I'm an L or XL, depending on the item, and I'm thin and just under six feet tall.  Most white guys are bigger than me, certainly fatter and in need of 4 or 6 inches more waist diameter. So I can see why they have so many XL and 2XL and 3XL.  But there are tons of guys smaller than me.  Most Hispanics and Asians are, and there are tons of those groups in San Diego.  So where are they expected to get their clothing?  Not at Ross, anyway.

Back to the selection.  Virtually every pair of men's pants is on one long row.  All mixed in together, but sorted by size, as detailed above. The next row over has men's dress pants, same size distribution, but classier slacks.  They have another row of men's polo-style shirts, and then long sleeve shirts, and there are a few smaller island displays of dressier shirts or designer stuff, but pretty much if you want a shirt, you know where to look.  Or shorts.  Or underwear.

Then the other 85% of the store is women's clothing.  Which are sorted in no particular order, and are just everywhere.  Rows and rows of tops of every type, slacks, shorts, skirts.  And then more rows of slacks that look identical to the male eye, but are apparently different in some fundamental way, making their storage and display imminently-logical, rather than just "some here and some there" as I would have termed it.

I look through a mile of slacks on two different rows before I ask a worker who directs me to yet another mile long row of pants, these being the active types, sweat and jogging pants and the like.  As I said above, they had none like I wanted.  The men's section had them, but only in L and above, which is far too big for the intended recipient.

My search to that point left me with just 80 or so long racks yet to look over, in search of a tolerable gift.  As I seldom pay attention to women's clothing (more to the body beneath it), I really have no idea what all they wear. It wouldn't seem to require such space to display it all, even including all of the business suits and other semi-formal stuff they have displayed there.  It seems like every woman I see is wearing jeans and a t-shirt.  Ugly low-rider jeans that make their ass look square and chunky, but jeans nonetheless.  Or else capri pants or slacks, but they've got legs and hip pockets; how different can they be?

If I had a woman who I was buying clothing for on a regular basis, I'd just give her money and tell her to get what she wanted.  I would even go with her and "yes dear" my way along, pretending to give a shit when she held up one virtually-identical outfit after another and said, "Ooh, this would be cute, huh honey?"  Just so long as I wasn't expected to go and pick out things on my own.  I even have ideas about what a woman looks good in, but the selection is just so overwhelming that I don't even know where to begin looking.  Plus if you find one decent thing you can't just giver her that.  It has to go with something else she has, and some shoes, and maybe a scarf or dress jacket over it.  Meanwhile neither you nor any other man ever notices for one second what the woman has on, unless her boobies appear to be falling out, or her ass looks especially quarter-bouncing good.

And then if you do somehow find something, the sizing is all weird. Random numbers with no logical correlation to S/M/L/XL, and half the time the woman wears something smaller than she should since it's a lower number.  Or just lies about what she is wearing. Or buys something too small in the hope it will force her into dieting and slimming down to where she can put it on.  Nevermind the fact that 90% of her current clothing would be too big at that point.

It just goes on and on.  The poor damned females. 

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.