The jeans at the store were 20% off, unless they were the Slim-Relaxed variety, which were 30% off, today, but not tomorrow after 3:06 p.m. Everything else in the store was 15% off, except for the things you really wanted, but additional markdowns, varying from 10% to 60%, would apply to the sales rack. If I found a really ugly shirt they were ashamed of making in the first place, the markdown would be 140%, and I'd make money on the deal, but only if I opened up a credit card, in which case they would take an additional 10% off the price.
Next week, the sales associate said, everything would be 40% off a second item if you joined the Reward program and submitted to an oral swab to get your DNA in the database so they could tailor their promotions to your needs.
Every trip to this store is like this, as if the company's marketing director used to write middle-school math textbook questions.
All I wanted was a light jacket. Something for those transitional days between winter and summer. I found something, but it was cut too broad, and made me look as if I was wearing a large grocery bag. Perhaps that's the style. Maybe I could get it in brown and write "Thank you" in 10 languages with a Sharpie, and people would think I was an old Lunds bag come to life.
Sigh. Well, nothing here. Let's go to the big anchor store ... oh, right, they've given up on life. Far less choice, and one-tenth the checkouts. If you want to buy some socks, you end up checking out at cosmetics.
I really didn't want to shop online, but, of course, that's where I ended up. OK, Amazon, pour forth the bounteous choices. Ah! Here's an inexpensive spring jacket, and it comes in 42 colors. Not 42 different-colored jackets; 42 colors on the same jacket. You look like you covered yourself with glue and rolled around in paint chips at Menard's.
Here's something severe and stylish, tapered at the waist to avoid that sacky look, and there are five choices of colors: Black, Charcoal, Dark Grey, Monochrome Dusk and Feverish Soviet Red. They have my size, but let's check the reviews.
"Runs short," says one. "Bought the small for my husband, who is 5'5", ended up using it on the chihuahua for cold-weather walks."
"Fits like a dream!" says another. Well, that depends on the dream. I had one the other night where I was walking around in a barrel filled with fish scales, followed by cats who walked on their back legs and whistled the "Andy Griffith" theme.
I figured I'd give it a try, and then I noticed a message at the top of the page: "You ordered this item on May 4, 2018."
Oh. That jacket. Yikes. It was so cheap that. ...
"How cheap was it? "
I'm going to tell you, but why did you shout out that phrase? Ohhhh, right. The ancient Johnny Carson reference. He'd say, "I knew a fellow who was so ontologically ignorant that. ...
"How ontologically ignorant was he?"
" ... he thought 'dispositionalism' was something a New Jersey philosopher would say when referring to positionalism."
(Applause; Ed shouts "Hi-yo.") Man, are we getting old. Anyway. It was cheap. So cheap that the zipper broke after just two weeks.
I kept searching on Amazon, and a few pages later I beheld something that made me feel — well, young again. It was a Members Only jacket.
I'm not talking some eBay listing for a vintage clothes reseller. I mean a brand-new Members Only jacket in the original style. The company had risen from the dead. The pictures showed glowering young people striking poses in the classic jacket with the epaulets. It came in gray, the same color I'd had. It was hip again! The '80s were back! Just imagine how I'd look, sporting the old threads, just like I was 25 again.
Then I imagined how I'd look, and my hand shrank from the ADD TO CART button like the feet of the Wicked Witch after the house fell. I would look absolutely pathetic. For heaven's sake, man, have some dignity. Act your age.
I think the company's greatest fear is selling the jacket to people who wore it the first time. They don't want to be popular with guys who buy Izod polo shirts for old times' sake, pop the collar and it sags. And they think, "Well, happens to us all. There's probably a pill for that."
In the end, I bought nothing. I'll go with the old jacket, the one that's so unstylish. ...
"How unstylish is it?"
Oh, hush, you Pavlovian minions. How unstylish? Amazon won't bring it back for another 16 years. Fourteen, if you sign up for their credit card.
