If The Shirt Fits

The idea of using December 26th to try on all the clothes you got for Christmas is such a part of the tradition that at this point I think it should get its own lyric in a holiday song. Trying on clothes for the first time is always a risky proposition because somewhere along the way clothing manufacturers stopped talking to one another and just started doing their own thing. This means that two shirts from different companies could fit a person totally differently, even though they may be labeled as the same size. (And occasionally that happens in the same company. Case in point, I was working for Reebok when they were bought by Adidas and even though they were now one company I had to get different sized shoes depending on which brand I was wearing.) This is why it is always a bad idea to trust labels and you should always try on shirts before you buy them. But, you obviously can't do that when someone gets you clothes as a present, which is why I try and do the next best thing by requesting different sizes depending on who makes the clothing in question. Fortunately I am a guy with a very low-brow clothing tastes, which meant I only had to memorize two or three clothing variations and then I was good as long as I never strayed from those brands when making out a wish list. Sadly, try as I might to never stray from these approved shirt makers, there are times when I see a shirt which I like from a brand I am unfamiliar with. That happened this Christmas when I saw a shirt online at the same time my sister was hounding me for a gift idea. Out of better options I pointed out this shirt to her, crossing my fingers it would fit when it arrived. I guess if I was going to appeal to the universe I should have asked Santa as, given the time of year, it may have increased my odds.

As it turns out, even though I usually maintain that I will not ask for clothes during the holidays, I asked for and got three shirts for Christmas. All of them claimed to be the same size, with being two from the same company. Those two are so large I am swimming in them. The third one, from the company I had never heard of, is too damn tight. I'm not saying it could pass for a medium but knowing my personal style I just know it is too tight for me to ever wear. I should have known there was a reason it was on sale. What was even more frustrating is that I could tell it wasn't going to fit almost before the shirt was all the way over my head. (Sometimes you just get that vibe.) If I were trying this shirt on in a store rather than my bedroom it is exactly the kind of situation which would have had me leaving the dressing room so quickly that the woman behind the counter handing out number tags would have just assumed I changed my mind about wanting it in the first place. The shame of it is that it's a very nice shirt but there is just no way I can keep it. Sure, I could pull and stretch it out for one day but as soon as it goes into the wash it will shrink right back to the same pre-stretch size, if not smaller. Rather than get one day out of it and then sentence it to a life of hanging towards the back half of my closet I will have to send it back, which I started to look into this afternoon. It was at that point I noticed something which made me remember why I don't like shopping online as much as everyone else seems to.

The package came with the normal "easy" return instruction, in that all I have to do is find a box or bag for this shirt to fit into and I can then slap on the label they sent in the original shipping invoice, go to my local FedEx store and send it on its merry way back to wherever it came from. But as I was reading the instructions I noticed some fine print down at the bottom of the label, informing me that while the cost of the shirt will mostly be returned, this company keeps $5.50 as a processing fee. At first I thought it seemed kind of fair because, after all, I am shipping something to them on a label they sent me. However, the more I thought about it the more I realized that if I put this shirt in any other kind of envelope and sent it to that address without their label it would probably cost me less money. Also, that logic implies that the cost of the return label is probably included in the original shipping and handling, which my sister already paid for so (a cost which this company probably pockets 95% of the time) and that means the $5.50 means essentially we're getting double charged. I guess what really bothers me is the way it was sort of hidden at the bottom of the sheet, like they were hoping I wouldn't notice. Reading it I was filled with the same kind of annoyance which used to bug me when Ticketmaster charged me for shipping and handling of tickets even though I printed them out from my home and they never shipped or handled anything. I'm seriously thinking about sending an invoice with the returned shirt because I am pretty sure I will have done more work to send it back to the distribution center than they did to send it to my sister in the first place.

The big talk this holiday shopping season was that the days of the brick-and-mortal malls are going to be coming to end. People have been making this claim for a number of years but sluggish sales for Black Friday compared to Cyber Monday have economists taking this rhetoric into overdrive, claiming too many people are opting to just give out gift cards and order online, so before too long we won't be dealing with malls or traffic, even if we wanted to. Now, I have long maintained that I don't agree with the people predicting the demise of the mall because there are always going to be people who want to hold stuff in their hands before slapping down their cash to buy it (same logic as to why books will never truly go away). I have to say it is little stuff like this superfluous charge to return an item when they already over-charged my sister to ship it out to her in the first place which is going to keep the retailers open for far longer than the experts are predicting. Sure, people are willing to pay a little extra for the convenience of not having to drive to a mall and fight for a parking space but eventually all these little fees start to pile up and tips the scales to the point it would be cheaper to pay the gas and go get the item yourself. It is just a matter of enough people doing the math before the tide starts to swing the other way. Admittedly, I probably shouldn't be pining my hopes for enlightenment on the math skills of most people (myself included) but I have to say that this encounter is forever burned into my brain and it will probably stop me from making a couple of purchases going forward. I have to say losing out on a sale which could be for tens of dollars in the name of screwing a customer over for $5 doesn't seem like a good business model. But, then again, what do I know - I can barely figure out what size shirt I should buy.