Last weekend I traveled back home to Richmond, Virginia for fall break. Going home for a weekend always gives me time to relax at my house, go out for decent meals, and spend time with my parents and sister. It also offers me the chance to go shopping with my mom. However, our shopping expedition this weekend was quite different from any other shopping trip I have ever been on before. Coincidentally, my fall break fell on the same weekend as the J.Crew Regional Warehouse Sale taking place in a vacant storefront in Richmond a few minutes from my house.
My mom had heard about the J.Crew sale in the paper earlier that week, but for fear of the unknown didn’t want to go alone so she waited for me to get home to accompany her. While I’ve done my fair share of outlet and bargain shopping, the scene at the J.Crew Regional Warehouse sale was unlike any retail sale I’ve experienced. I’ve attached pictures, but they barely do it justice.
We got to the sale location around 11:00 A.M, barely an hour after it opened. There is already a line of over thirty women waiting outside just to get into the store due to occupancy regulations. Keep in mind the sale has already been going on for four days and it is pouring raining outside. While waiting in line, a woman working the event came up to my mom and I and handed us each a giant clear plastic trash bag and a price list. Some of the prices were as follows:
Tops: $10.00
Tanks: $5.00
Pants: $20.00
Shorts: $10.00
Sweaters: $25.00
Dresses: $25.00
Shoes: $30.00
Boots: $50.00
Flip-flops: $2.00
Swimwear: $3.00
For those of you who are familiar with normal prices of J.Crew clothing, these sound like unbelievable deals. For example, right now on the J.Crew website, women’s shirts are ranging from $50 to over $100. After reading the price list in line, my mom and I are wondering what the catch is. Sure enough, the moment we were granted entry into the store we immediately found out. First off, we were greeted at the door by a policeman who is there monitoring the store which is already filled with over 200 women of all ages. The only three men that I did see in the entire store were following their wives around pushing babies in strollers and counting their money in the line for checkout.
While the crowd itself was one thing, the entire shopping experience was another. Instead of clothes hanging on clothing racks and folded on tables organized by color, size, and style, the entire room consisted of rows upon rows of fold-up tables with cardboard boxes overflowing with mounds of clothes set on top of them. While each of the boxes was labeled with something like “Women’s shirts” or “Size 8 Shoes” or “Pants,” we soon found out that these labels had nothing to do with the items that were actually in the boxes. It looked as if they had tried to organize the clothes during the first few days of the sale but then gave up later in the week. I soon began to understand why. Instead of calmly looking through each box, women were shopping as if there were in some sort of race or competition. They were screaming to their friends from across the store, plunging through mounds of clothing, and throwing anything they didn’t want out of their way onto the floor or into other boxes. Some women would even take an entire box of clothing for themselves and go sit in the corner to sort through it all privately. Since there were no dressing rooms, some of the most dedicated women crowded in another corner of the store trying to discreetly try clothes on in the wide open room.
Now I began to understand the trade off that these women were valuing. In order to get cheap prices on brand name clothing, they were willing to forgo the traditional, calm shopping experience for a madhouse, flea-market type setting in which it was every woman for herself.
While at first we attempted to sort through some clothing looking for nice sweaters and blazers, my mom and I soon gave up as we were constantly tripping over clothing and shoved out of the way by other shoppers. Instead, we headed to the other end of the warehouse where there were boxes of leather boots on sale. Given the good price and the fact that boxes of boots were much easier to pick out than mounds of fabric, we began looking for boots to purchase. Once again, we were amazed at the disorganization. While the cardboard boxes were labeled with shoe sizes, at this late date in the sale all sizes were mixed together. To make it even worse, the shoes were not even paired together, so it was just boxes full of left and right shoes of all sizes. Not only did we have to search for our sizes, but we had to find a left shoe and a right shoe in each color and style. Regardless, we were up for the challenge this time and spent about 30 minutes looking for matching boots for each other and my sister. We each ended up buying a pair of short brown leather boots for $50 each. On top of that, we were given a 30% off coupon for our entire purchase that dropped the prices down even more.
-Jacqueline Buff is a senior Business & Enterprise Management major with concentrations in Marketing and Arts Markets and an Art History minor.
After reading this post, I can confidently say that this scene would fall near the top of my “last places I would ever want to be” list. Right up there with watching the Steelers beat my beloved Ravens (which does not happen often). In my opinion this is a classic example of etiquette being dependent on where the store falls on the consumers’ perceptual map. In a typical J. Crew store almost all shoppers conduct themselves in a calm fashion, always mindful to respect surrounding shoppers and the item displays. This is a result of J. Crew being viewed as a high-end store, with that comes certain expectations in terms of shopping etiquette. However, in the case of this J. Crew sale, the feeling of the usual high-end store goes out the window, accompanied by the previously mentioned manners. The fold out tables, paper signs, and clothes being strewn about haphazardly gives a sense of a low-end bargain store, which encourages shoppers to act in a manner consistent with a low-end “payless” type store.
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