Did a spot of family shopping at Target today, purely because J prefers it over Kmart. I can see why. Kmart is overrun by grockles called Tracee and Brian in ugg boots and tracksuits and mullets, whereas Target is populated by people called Luigi and Guido with slightly more upmarket gold chains and fancy thongs.
Until today, I have always viewed Target as a place purely to buy clothes for the kids. Because they are cheap, and the complete lack of service means that you aren't being bombarded by 2 pushy sales assistants whilst you struggle to get the little sods to try something on that they don't want to wear. There are clothes that Mum wants them to wear, and then there are the clothes that they want to wear, and the two sets are completely non-intersecting.
Today though, I changed my mind. Now I am a guy that likes his clothes. I am not a wog-type clothes horse thought. I like English style business shirts made out of pure Egyptian cotton. My ties are all silk, some being hand painted. My suits are pure wool. If I could afford hand made shoes, I'd have them. I own no clothes that have any synthetic material in them, apart from the elastic in my socks. Apart from my Speedoes.
There is just one problem with all that - it's expensive, and the stains never come out. And the little monkey has managed to dig holes through several of my Oxford shirts with his razor sharp fingernails, and stained the rest with God-knows what. By this morning, I no longer owned a single shirt that wasn't holed or stained.
So I fronted up at the polo shirt stand and dug in. It was a revelation - shirts for $13! I normally pay about $70 for a good Country Road or Oxford polo, but I don't think I will be doing that for a few years. As much as I love their cut and cloth and durability, they don't stand up to the monkey test.
The Target shirts are of course complete rubbish. They sit badly on my shoulders. The neck and collar are all wrong. The fabric is thin crap. I'm not sure about the stitching, but I am sure a sleeve will fall off within a month. However, given that I can buy 5 for the price of a normal one, I will put up with 5 and hope that one is still wearable at Christmas.
That was the good news.
The shocking part was finding shirts that fitted. I tried on an "L" and an "XL", and found that both were a good fit, but I like to roll around a bit in my clothes, so I went for the XL. But I was stumped - there were 7 types of XL. There was a plain XL, then an XL1, and XL2, an XL3 etc all the way up to XL6. I didn't get this, since they also had XXL shirts. I am used to simple sizing - S, M, L and XL. The shops that I normally go to don't go for an XXL, so I was wondering what the fuck all these different XL sizes were for.
Then I looked at the actual cm measurements for each, and discovered that whilst an XL for me is slightly baggy, an XL1 would be 5cm larger, and XL2 5cm larger again etc until you get to the XXL, which is a mumu. I almost fell over with the shock of realising that as far as that shop is concerned, I am a small person.
I went home and had a pizza lunch in celebration.
The other bad news (for shareholders) was the location of the changing rooms. I have a very good book called "Why we buy", by Paco Underhill. It is a marvelously well written book that explains everything you never wanted to know about how shops suck you in. Everyone should read it. It has nothing to do with marketing and advertising. It is all about where to position signs in a store, what to put inside the front door and how far in the door it should be, how wide aisles should be, what lights to install, where to locate the toilets etc etc. All the boring, mundane things that make your shopping trip hell or marvelous.
Anyway, some fucking idiot decided to skimp on the change rooms and to put both the mens and womens change rooms together. That doesn't bother me, but I am sure it would put the willies up a lot of men and women who would be very, very uncomfortable about getting changed near the opposite sex. And to cap it off, to get to the change rooms, you have to walk through the bra section. Again, that does not bother me, but it would freak some men out. I'm sure it would also freak some women out to be browsing for bras, and then to have all these men walk past giving them an oggle.
I am sure that single feature is the biggest money loser that the store has. I looked around to see whether people had just dumped clothes instead of walking down through the bras to try them on. What blew me away is that all these professional managers did not have the brains to see that as a problem. A wonderful fact that Paco tells us is that if a man takes clothes into a change room, 80% of the time, he will buy them. I took some shorts, shirts and pants in, and the only ones that I did not buy were those that did not fit. Women on the other hand only buy something like 15% of what they try on.
Therefore, if you want to sell men clothes, all you have to do is convince them to walk into a change room and put them on. However, if they are too freaked to walk into the change room area, that's just money walking out the door.
No wonder all these department stores are in trouble.
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