Tuesday, August 11, 2009

A Hot Saving from the Coals

This coming weekend I am going to be out of town. And then I will be out town again in mid-September. In preparation for these trips I need some new clothes. Need is a funny word. I need the clothes as in the powers that be tell me I need the clothes. And since I don't mind shopping I'm not going to make a huge stink about it. What is frustrating is that whenever I go out dressed up, everyone complains that I always wear the same thing. Let's look at my main summer situation, I own 2 nice slacks, 2 nice jeans, 4 nice shirts, 3 nice belts, and 2 pairs of shoes. As far as I'm concerned that's 512 potential outfits, so I get very confused when people say I always wear the same thing. For this upcoming weekend I was told I need a nice pair of shorts.

That one I can't really argue about. I haven't been wearing shorts this summer. I decided to go European and instead wear my slacks whenever I go out. This even includes when I'm outside for long periods of time such as walking around the pond or sitting out on the patio at the club house for lunch. But it's not that bad. The slacks are made for the summer so the material is thin and they're about as cool as shorts. Anyway, my point is that I have no shorts. All of mine are years old, and are meant for getting dirty. So I started looking. First I went to Lacoste online. Their shorts are $120. That's a touch ridiculous. But they were on sale for $75 off putting them around $45. Hey, that's not so bad. But I decided to see what all was at the mall here in town.

Very quickly I found there was next to nothing. Every place is trying to bring out their autumn lines, and what shorts are available are cargo shorts for highschoolers. Getting desperate, I even broke all my rules and tried looking in American Eagle and Abercrombie. It had been a few years and I thought maybe they had improved their image a bit. Nope, I got disgusted and walked out with a larger than usual scowl. I finally found a good pair at Banana Republic but they were not on sale at $45. For that price I figured I could get the Lacoste pair but I bought the pair anyway as a 'just in case I can't find another pair' backup.

Leaving the mall I went to Kohl's. Kohl's is in a perpetual state of going out of business. Whenever I go in it seems the whole store is 70% off. Kohl's did have a nice pair of shorts that I wanted. But they were $36 and not on sale. This was offputting, that the one item I find is the only item in the store not on sale. I put them back and figured I'll just come back in two days because by then they'll be on sale. And sure enough the next day (yesterday) in the mail I got a $10 off any purchase card. So I went in today picked up a pair and went to the register. The lady said I owed $18. And I said she must be mistaken they are $36 (I hadn't given her the card yet). She said they were on sale for 50% off, they just weren't marked. Wow! In the end I paid $8 for those shorts, and they're pretty nice looking.

Okay, all of that was pretty useless information. But I needed a prelude to the blogs I will be posting the rest of this week and next, and this was the best place I could find to start.

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