Sunday, February 21, 2010

Am I Being Too Picky?

I recently misplaced my only pair of chinos (don't ask how a person loses pants because I have no idea how I managed it), and since we're not supposed to wear jeans to work, I thought I should replace them before my argument that I'm wearing trousers that just happen to be made out of denim starts to wear thin.  Because J.Crew's chinos fit really well and don't make me look like my mother, I decided I'd just man up and pay full price for a good pair.  I pre-shopped online and narrowed my choices down to the following:
The Original Fit chino and the Favorite Fit Everyday chino.  I went to the J.Crew in Pioneer Place to try on pants, and while they had both styles, they only had limited colors.  I figured this was no big deal.  I would go to a bigger store on the weekend and get the color I wanted (the fatigue color on the right).

I get to the J.Crew at Bridgeport Village on Saturday, and it takes me a good 10 minutes to even find the chinos, and then there was only one style (the Original Fit) and two colors (natural, which is very light, and pink).  So I ask where the rest of the chinos are, and these are the only ones in the store.  If I want anything else (like the exact pants the model on the website is being shown in), I'll have to order them.   I point out that the reason that I'm in the store is because 1) I don't want to pay shipping; 2) I don't want to take the risk that these pants will fit differently than the pair I tried on in the other store (seriously, when mass production cuts multiple layers at one time, the item on top is always smaller than the item on the bottom) and to make sure that I like the color; and 3) I'm in a bit of a time crunch.  I was assured that if I ordered them through the in-store catalog, I wouldn't have to pay shipping and that I could return them in-store if they didn't work. 

Now this might seem reasonable, but how many of you want to walk into a store to purchase a standard item and have to order it to even see if you like it?  I'm not that person.  I find this whole system to be horribly inconvenient, and I was told by the sales staff that the next closest J.Crew location at Washington Square was exactly the same way (by the way, kudos to the sales staff for dealing with the snippy woman first thing on a Saturday morning, but I had just tried to go to the office to get some extra work done, and all the servers were down, including the print server, and while I can work without the main servers, I cannot work without the printers, so I was extra aggravated by the time I got to the store).

I don't know why I'm so annoyed.  I mean, other than chinos, I really have no use for J.Crew.  I find that they are overpriced for the quality of what you get, and other than the chinos, the fit of most of their clothes is not right for me.  Anyway, I walked out of the store pronouncing the whole experience as "inconvenient with a capital 'I,'" and went straight to Anthropologie and purchased three tops.  And despite two and a half hours in the mall, I never did find chinos.  Probably serves me right for being a bitch.

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