Polyester
The moment I enter Ross Dress for Less in Culver City, California it's clear that the people shopping are far superior, better human beings than the people who are working in the store. In fact, the work atmosphere feels like a clearing house for bad attitudes; all I can smell inside the store at first is the sweat of the sweathshop.
I've come to Ross Dress for Less looking for a decent shirt. There are racks and racks of men's shirts, decent and indecent, each shirt hanging on a plastic coat hanger. I want something nice, long-sleeve, in blue or white, to wear to a dinner party in Studio City I hadn't known about when I left San Francisco for LA, packing only t-shirts and a gray sweater that I'd spilled sauce on the day before while eating lunch at the original Philippe's French-Dip restaurant downtown.
There are two of us men in the dress-shirt aisle--a young long-haired Latino with a long pony-tail and a thousand tats, and me; each of us are inspecting the goods. The guy has style, I can tell he knows exactly what he's looking for and is able to see immediately what's good or bad about a shirt. Compared to him I know nothing about shopping for shirts, or about anything else for that matter.
He's got two or three shirts by the neck, so to speak, when I bump into him, accidently.
"Sorry," I say.
"No problem," he replies. "Take your time, man."
Finally, I find two shirts of my own--a Michael Kors ($12.49) and a Dockers ($16.99). I take the Michael Kors shirt off the coat hanger. It's buttoned to the very top. The young guy I bumped into watches as I struggle with the shirt, trying to get the buttons unbuttoned so that I can try the shirt on.
"Welcome to button hell," he says, and we laugh. He offers to unbutton the shirts for me; there's no condescension--it's not necessarily a younger man coming to the resuce of an older man, though it could be that--just a human gesture of goodwill, but I insist on unbuttoning the shirt by myself.
I deliberate for a moment and pick the Michael Kors shirt, walking to the check-out counter. It's here I'll stand for 10 minutes or so. There's only one cashier, and she looks as if she thinks she's being overworked; four other Ross Dress for Less employees mill about nearby, doing nothing as far as I can tell.
Meantime the line at the checkout counter is growing. I look at the line now in back of me: there's my 'friend', four or five customers to the rear. He smiles and shakes his head; he's been here before.
The next evening, getting ready for the dinner, I take my new Michael Kors shirt out of the plastic Ross for Dress bag. It smells, unfortunately, of the store where it was bought, but I'm confident that once I put it on and move around in the bright Los Angeles air it will smell as good as anything I could have bought at Nordstrom or Saks. Buying anything polyester was once against my principles, but not any more.