posted 2007/07/18 at 16:29
As I wrote yesterday, following my excursion to UT to apply for a job, I headed over to our local Old Navy to pick up some nice shirts to wear for job interviews. I shopped mostly from the clearance section, but I picked up a total of three nice shirts and paid barely more than fifteen bucks. I don't think I could have gotten that good of a deal even shopping Meijer's generic clothing. Perhaps I could have gotten a better deal at Wal*Mart, but, well, I don't shop at Wal*Mart.
This kind of takes me back, because it's actually been over six years since I last bought anything at Old Navy. (This is more due to the fact that Old Navy's kind of a ways away from me than me avoiding a popular brand just for the sake of avoiding a popular brand.) I can remember this clearly because I had just recently dropped below 200 pounds and I was able to fit into non-plus size women's clothing for the first time. One of my friends at the time swore by Old Navy jeans, so I picked a pair up even though I've never particularly cared for jeans. (Particularly now that I'm so into dance games I just can't see myself wearing jeans again, given how much they limit my mobility.) I liked the jeans an awful lot, but then somehow they got lost after the house fire. (I think they were in the wash at the time, and that they somehow just didn't get returned. Either that, or like so many other things of ours, they turned up missing from the boxes of stuff the disaster recovery people took out of the house.)
I also remember that my first shopping trip to Old Navy was close enough to the fire that I still had the shopping bag the jeans came in, which was quite sturdy. In fact, I actually used it to carry my books to and from UT for that first summer class I took. I didn't need anything bigger, and the bag did a nice job for me in that regard. Once I was going to school full-time, though, I needed a bigger bag, and so I bought a proper bookbag. I don't recall exactly what happened to that bag, but I remember it serving me in good stead for quite some time. I have the Old Navy bag from yesterday sitting next to me, but it's of a much flimsier construction than that first bag I got, and I'll probably end up just throwing it out here.
Although this was only the second time I ever bought anything at Old Navy, I actually went there a number of times after that first trip I made. The reason for that is that this particular store actually bordered the property of the hotel our family stayed at after the fire, to the point that if you went to one of our windows and looked down, the Old Navy logo was pretty much the first thing you saw. You couldn't just walk straight over because of the fences around both the hotel property and the Old Navy store, plus the fact that it was the back of the Old Navy that faced the hotel, but I walked over there with my sister quite a few times as she started to rebuild her wardrobe after losing it all in the fire. For that matter, since there were so many other stores within walking distance of the hotel (most notably the city's only Bed Bath and Beyond at the time), she and I did quite a lot of walk-around shopping then. As much of a pain it was to live in that hotel for nearly eleven months for a number of reasons, it was kind of nice that I could actually walk to some good stores while I was there.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon