Day 144

There is a story whispered in my town, most often told at nail salons and over lunches with friends or margaritas after work. The story always starts the same.

Have you ever heard about the really rich (always emphasis on the word rich) woman who has a compulsive shopping habit and buys so many clothes that at her therapist’s behest she holds some big sale every year and sells off everything, still with the tags, for 75% off?

I have heard it several times but always dismissed it as an urban legend along the lines of kidney thieves and killer Pop Rock soda cocktails—until now.

This week I was at the hair dresser and she told the same story.  But this time she ended it by saying, “It’s going on now.”

Several women in the room offered some insight.  Many had been to the sale in years past; the farthest I could trace back, based entirely on beauty shop hearsay and rumor was eight years.  One person said, “They put out new items every Tuesday.”

“Every Tuesday, how long does the sale go on?” I asked.

“At least a few weeks, until it’s gone,” someone offered, “It is part of her therapy.”

OK wait… I’m no mental health professional, but if she has been doing this for eight years, maybe it’s not working.  If she’s that loaded, perhaps instead of hiring a counselor, she could just retain someone with a shrill voice to follow her around and repeatedly tell her not to buy stuff and then she wouldn’t have to have a sale.  See, problem solved.

Anyway, I was intrigued, so I moseyed on over.

HOLY MOTHER OF CASHMERE

This rather large room was completely filled with pricey clothes and accessories all with their original tags from a variety of posh stores and offered for sale at 75% off.   I was trying to surreptitiously take a couple of photos, but I’m not great in stealth mode so I ended up with mostly pictures of my armpit and purse strap.  Here are a couple that turned out.

This hardly does it justice

I wasn’t planning on buying anything. I was merely there gawking.  But then the following variables were introduced.

The first was that I ran into an acquaintance that owns a local resale shop.  We chatted for a few moments and I mentioned that I wasn’t going to buy anything because all of the clothes still had the tags on them, they were new.  At that point, she assured me that this was definitely resale and that all this apparel had been previously purchased and had been hanging in this woman’s closet (or airplane hangar). Well, she did have point…

The next variable was that somehow the whole room was full of clothes that were roughly one size, my size. What are the odds?

The final variable was the huge rack of jeans. Not the kind of jeans I would buy before The Simple Year from TJ Maxx.  These are the fancy pants jeans with strange sizing and confusing names.  For years, almost without exception jeans were named after either the designer that conceived of them or the store that sold them.  I can understand that.  But recently jeans have developed these strange monikers that sound like something my girlfriends and I would dream up after a couple of bottles of wine.

“OK, I’m going to start making jeans, and so people will want them, we’ll charge at least $200.  And we’ll call them; let’s see…The Republic of Hell Yeah.”  Then we would all fist bump, open another bottle and think that was the best idea we ever heard; even though it was stupid and doesn’t have anything at all to do with jeans.

Anyway, somehow I left with jeans. And I am slightly ashamed to admit, I don’t have buyer’s remorse. I WANT to feel bad. The rational part of me feels like I should, particularly since I looked up compulsive spending and it is an actually psychiatric disorder along the lines of compulsive gambling and eating.   Did I take advantage of this woman’s illness?  And I really don’t need jeans which is the whole point of The Simple Year.

I almost didn’t write this because I am so conflicted about the experience, but I did say that I was going to document the journey and so ultimately I suppose I should tell all of it even if it makes me look borderline unscrupulous.