Is there a dress code for shopping?

My recent rant about receipts and store guards shows that shopping is not an exercise that I enjoy. It is almost as if there is an anger inside me that shopping releases. Amongst the more memorable of my experiences has to be the abandoned holiday shop. This was the last shop before Christmas, one that I normally try to get done out-of-town. Having beaten the crowds to find all of the items I required I ran them through the self scanning till. There was one item that wouldn’t scan, I called the attendant to investigate. The resulting conclusion was that the item hadn’t been put onto stock so couldn’t be sold. Let me be clear, said item was fresh, undamaged and perfectly fit for sale this was simply an issue of paperwork. I believe that my reaction was appropriate and proportional, I abandoned the entire shop and left empty-handed. I guess I should point out that the item in question was the turkey, the most important item on the list.

I can now add another experience to my list of shopping horrors. I recently visited a gents clothing store, it wasnt a critical shop but I had ten minutes to kill. The store was running a deal where if you purchased a £14.99 shirt you got another one from the same range free along with any tie from the £4.95 range. Now these may not have been top end shirts but hey you can always use an extra shirt right? As I entered the store I browsed some suits out of curiosity. Almost immediately I had a sales assistant on hand asking me what help I needed, I politely said I was OK. This wasn’t enough, the shop assistant clearly decided that I was out of my depth looking at suits and shirts, he wasn’t going to let go.

The thing with sales assistants is that whilst they may want to say “there’s a shop down the road that may be more your style” commission stops them. I decided that I would take a shirt and the guy was on hand to ask if I had any idea what size I was, oh and to explain that it was neck size that they used on shirts. Having assured him of the size of the shirt that I required we started the debate. Did I want long or short sleeves, short collar or formal, pockets and did I want button or cufflink cuffs. He actually tailed off at cufflinks because it was clear to him that as a new entrant to the world of formal clothing that would be a step too far. By this time I was seething, I selected the right shirt and as we reached the till realised that I had inadvertently been up sold. The shirt on the counter was £32, but by now I was so annoyed that I was happy to purchase and get out of there.

Having scanned the shirt he asked if I would like another ‘because there is a deal’. Oh yes I will have that candy stripe in the same size please, hey if it’s buy one get one free they might as well both be £32. Duly scanned the till must have prompted him and he asked “do you have a tie?” apparently I could have one for free. Of course I could have dragged the young sales assistant across the counter and beaten him whilst explaining that appearances can be deceptive, I chose the tie. I selected a tie that I liked and it was scanned, I paid, collected  my goods and fled the store. I was smiling as I left and the reason was printed on the receipt, two shirts at £32 each and a tie at £14 should total at £78. My total was £14.99, the sales assistant had manually edited all of the prices to honour a deal that was not on offer, doubtless whilst muttering at the ‘bloody till’.

If the sales assistant should ever happen across my blog then i would like to take the opportunity to set him straight on some things. Appearances can be very deceptive I am an excellent example of this. The long-haired, baseball cap wearing, tattooed man who you met may have been wearing jeans but he owns half a dozen suits and well over a dozen shirts. Where you wear a suit to work because the company provide it and that is what you sell I wear suits to high level meetings in industry. When you judge me by what you see it is you that loses and not me. Only the ill-informed and narrow-minded make snap judgements on what they are presented with, the rest of us are too used to being judged.

In fairness the shop assistant is not alone, despite the celebrity trends for tattoos I still don’t present a cuddly image. When I stand behind somebody at the ATM they tense and their body language changes yet I have never mugged anybody. When I walk in an alley the person in front will quicken their pace  despite the fact that I have no interest in them. If I stand by a door in a bar people will ask if they can enter or if there is a cover charge. I guess that it is not all bad though, it makes it a little more special when the nice people take the time to know me. Oh and I couldn’t leave this post without recalling the travelling fair. When my children were younger we visited the local fair and I stood waiting for the children to finish on their current ride. By the time the ride had finished I answered three questions on age restrictions and took £6 in cash. Apparently my appearance does fit some environments.

It’s not a secret its just in code

I have my blog installed on my phone, which should lend itself to drafting my thoughts when they are still fresh, but unfortunately the power manager shuts the blog down without saving anything so its less than ideal. I have now taken to emailing myself little memory jogs for the next post but I appear to be struggling to collate all of the individual emails in my inbox hence the delay in posting Friday’s shopping experience, well better late than never.

Fridays, as most of you know, involve a return through Stratford where I will have up to 30 minutes to fill depending on how efficient the staff train was from the depot. I could get closer to my destination and lose time there but at Stratford there is a large, dry, warm shopping centre so it wins hands down as long as the train service is not disrupted. This Friday there were two items on my shopping list, I grabbed some deodorant from Superdrug and a hoody from JD sports, checked my watch and still 20 minutes until my train so I started the aimless walk around the shops. Not being female I am not programmed to window shop, I really can’t lose time like that, shopping is a task and not an experience. In a shopping centre with no purpose l resort to charging around without any direction, the only thing going for it is the exercise rather like an oversized hamster wheel.

On one of my laps I found myself outside Victoria’s Secrets with a rather enticing storefront, now I have not used this store before but its a common feature in US novels so I guess it wasn’t really a secret but hey it said so on the sign. As I wandered through rails of underwear I was writing a review in my mind, there was no reason for this its just something that I do when I have no other purpose in a store, and noting that some of the items were rather boring but then if your brand of choice is Sloggi I guess it doesn’t take too much to be provocative. I leave one earphone from my iPod in while I am shopping, partly because it means I don’t lose them in my shirt and secondly because it deters some of the less determined hawkers selling Sky TV, but this sales assistant approached from the other side:

Sales Assistant – “Can I be of any assistance sir?”
Me – “No I don’t think so thank you”
SA – “Do you know your partners sizes?”
Me – “No I am single actually”
SA – “Erm, oh sorry its just that… Well is it a gift that your looking for”
Me – “Nope”
SA – now looking rather nervous, backing away and trying to size me up “We do stock some less common sizes”
Me – “Well that’s good to know should I ever meet any less commonly sized women”

At this point she turned tail and fled although I am sure that her ‘odd customer’ was the source of much discussion over coffee later. For reference, if any sales trainers are reading this, there is no need to apologise to me for the fact that I am single it is not your fault, and the fact that I am male does not preclude me from browsing female clothing.

To finish my mental review I would say that there is a good range, its overpriced but you expect that with the brand and to be honest there was no secret, I didn’t learn anything that I didn’t already know.

As I was writing this all the old jokes about sizing your partners breasts by comparison to the assistants came to mind, you know the ones about trying to buy a bra whose cup size is ‘about a handful’, and it occurred to me that one of the benefits of sisters is that I have never been shy about shopping for women and its afforded me some fun over the years. When I was called upon to visit Ann Summers* some years ago I obviously combined it with another task, taking my young son to the cinema, and was quite astonished when they asked me to leave the store. The toy section is discretely placed and not immediately obvious, I don’t believe that seeing underwear was going to corrupt my son so I really don’t think that it was wrong to take him in there in fact I think it was funny when he pointed at the chocolate genitals and asked for chocolate. Perhaps its the secret thing again, when wifey is buying provocative clothes she doesn’t want to be reminded that she is also mummy? Women’s minds eh, go figure.

On a visit to collect my son a few years back I had been asked by my then girlfriend to purchase some tampons, not an unreasonable request but one that requires more information than I had. My son and I located the appropriate area in the store and the. Realised we were in women’s world, its like trying to chose a paint sample, different brands, styles, sizes and even scents how in the hell do you chose? Did I need ones with skirts, what benefit that produces I have no idea I thought skirts were an outer garment, ones with pearls? I fail to see what a pearl can do in terms of absorption it really is all designed to confuse and confound. So I called the girlfriend “do you want small, medium or super soaker? With pearls or without? With a gun or self applied?” Before answering she asked where I was to which I replied, fairly obviously, that I was in the store she screamed that I can’t talk about that in public and put the phone down on me.

My son and I were discussing our predicament when a sales assistant asked if she could help, oh yes I said thank you for offering ‘I am horribly confused and my girlfriend won’t answer the phone now she is about your size but about 5 years older than you with longer hair that is dyed black, I am guessing that your about the same size so which tampons do you use and I will get the same for her’
I don’t know whether it was seeing a grown man and an 11 year old looking her up and down, comparing her with the girlfriend and keenly awaiting the answer or whether there is some sort of female code that prevents them speaking on the subject, or perhaps she couldn’t remember without checking the tag, but she fled. So it was, with such an absence of support, that I had to purchase one of every size in 2 brands in the comfort of home this made for much hilarity and I believe I kept several women in tampons for some time, but really couldn’t they just put age or weight on the box?

*for those not in the UK this is a hideously overpriced store that stocks poor quality clothing and sex toys but has an extremely popular party sales plan