A Little Coup at the Second-Hand Store

Yesterday I took a nice old skirt that I really love to the tailor at the cleaner’s near the restaurant where the Thursday morning business group meets. It needed a new strip of elastic in the waist.

An outlet of My Sister’s Closet, the upscale resale consignment store, is right next door. Well, I really needed some tops to replace the threadbare rags I’ve been wearing with my vast collection of Costco jeans. So, I thought, why not?

“Why not,” of course, is that place is dangerous. But amazingly, I managed not to spend much money and still came away with a major shopping coup.

Ended up at the racks and racks of second-hand Chico’s outfits. Ordinarily I don’t shop at Chico’s and didn’t, even when I had a job, because I dislike their high-pressure sales tactics and because the 1 through 3 sizing is very annoying. However, with no one hovering over my shoulder or lurking outside the dressing rooms to tell me how “wonderful!” I look in something that makes me look like a potato sack tied in the middle, I thought again, why not?

Incredibly, I found a sheer silk shirt with its price tag still on it, really pretty: they were selling it for $20. And even more incredibly, it fit. The original price was $100!

On the same hanger was a matching beige tank top, also with its original $38  price tag hanging from the collar tag: $8.95!

Can you believe????

Also in the $10 and under range, I got a nice loose-woven crocheted sweater from Jones New York and an awesome matching cami-like thing (only heavier fabric than a cami), both in deep amethyst…perfect for wearing with a red hat. 😉

And a cute little blue sweater that will look great with the blue Sanitas clodhoppers I bought a while back. Since clodhoppers are now about all I can wear, thanks to the endless foot and back agonies, I’ll be getting a lot of use out of those shoes and anything that will go with them.

And a pretty crocheted tank top that will look utterly awesome over the collected Costco camis. And a blue polyester tank that they were practically giving away.

I won’t have to buy any more clothes this winter. Except for networking group shindigs and the rare client meeting, most of the time I live in Costco’s old-lady jeans. Once class finally comes to an end, I’ll have few occasions to wear anything else. These tops will make me feel a lot less grody, and they’ll be acceptable for grocery-store runs and schmoozing with friends. The silk top with its beige tank will work nicely for those Chamber meetings.

To give you an idea of what I mean by Chico’s absurd sizing system, one of these things is a size one, two are size zero(!), and the others are size two.  A history of the chain reveals that this scheme is deliberately designed to confuse buyers about sizing: “A woman who in another store would be wearing a size 16 might be flattered to fit into a 3 at Chico’s.” Right: aren’t us customers dumb?

I’ve found that virtually none of the stuff I find in their stores fits, though it’s hard to tell with the sales staff buzzing around your head like hungry mosquitos. The same business profile reports that “Sales clerks were to make astute judgments about fit and style and also offer accessories or additional pieces of an ensemble.” LOL! That’s a polite way to put it.

At the checkout register, I remarked to the clerk that I never go in to Chico’s because I’m so put off by the high-pressure sales tactics. The sales rep laughed and said she’d been in retailing all her adult life (which, we might add, was probably about as long as mine) and that she also wouldn’t shop there, for the same reason.

“You’ll notice how they don’t have mirrors in the dressing rooms. That’s so you’ll have to go outside the room to look at how things fit in those big mirrors—and so the sales staff can get at you every time you try on anything.

“And,” she added, “those are slimming mirrors. They make you look more slender than you are, so you think the clothes look better on you than they do.” She said when she saw herself in one of those things, she thought, “That’s not me in this mirror!” And she never went back.

🙄

Well, I couldn’t say one way or the other whether that’s true. If the mirrors are “slimming,” it must mean I’m not gonna look any better ten pounds lighter than I do right now, and so I guess I can have a beer with breakfast.

But I can say that almost everything I’ve tried on in Chico’s looks awful on me, and I dislike being pestered and barraged with false flattery so much that I don’t shop there. It was interesting that at My Sister’s Closet, where sales assistance is so low-key as to be nonexistent, I found several things in their brand that I like. It may be that the clothes are OK but the atmosphere in Chico’s stores is discouraging.

Am I the only one who finds high-pressure sales tactics SO off-putting as to actually negate any impulse to buy things?