Suit You, Sir

My August feels like it is almost over before it’s really started. Tomorrow, I fly to Raleigh for work, meaning that I’ll be spending my 10th anniversary of emigrating to the United States right back in the same area where I started (and hopefully meeting up with a bunch of friends I haven’t seen for over a year now), and then I’m back to the UK straight after for my grandmother’s funeral. By the time I get back, most of August will have already gone, the second Pandemic Summer will almost be behind us. And on to Winter as we march through the Greek alphabet.

Anyway, I had to buy a suit. Now, I was expecting this to be a trip that took an hour at most, having been somewhat conditioned by basically just buying clothes online from Amazon for the past 18 months. There hours and multiple shops later…

Several thoughts from the trip:

• Malls still exist, huh?
• Why are you all not wearing masks?
• The party trick where some of the people in the department can eyeball your measurements almost exactly is impressive
• “Oh that looks good on you. And this suit is $695”
• Stepping into the suit section of a department store somehow feels like going back to America in 1965, even if you can still see the modern world from the corner of your eye.
• And obviously, for everybody of a certain age from Britain, this series of sketches.

Having decided that I wasn’t going to spend almost $1,000 on a suit and shirt, we picked some things off the shelf…and I’m still not sure what I paid. Numbers had no meaning, despite there being a lot of them:

• The actual price
• The sale price
• The note by the clothes saying that despite the sale price, “the actual price may be lower”
• The perennial Sales Tax
• 20% off if you open a Macy’s Credit Card Today!
• “You’ve earned x number of Star Rewards! You can apply those within 30 days to other purchases!”

It’s basically Douglas Adams’ Bistromathics, but for clothes shopping.

As ever, thanks to Tammy for coming along, pointing out when things looked awful and pointing out my cardinal sin of doing up the bottom button (why is it there, then? Whyyyyy???).

Right, I’m back to making chocolates for the rest of the day. And hopefully this time, my honeycomb doesn’t turn into molten sludge…