Shopping BCE (Before Computer E-commerce)

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Remember when you needed clothes, shoes, household items, and just about anything else, what did you do? Well, you went to the store to buy it, right? Well, maybe you don't remember that if you're under thirty, but the rest of us do. For those of you who don't know what the deuce I'm talking about, let me go into a little detail of how it used to work in the prehistoric days. Now, stay with me, because the following examples take a bit of reading.

Let's say you're a man. And as a man you decided one day that you needed a couple of new shirts and maybe a pair of chinos. You got dressed, jumped in the car, and drove to either a department store, or a men's shop (A men's shop, once called a haberdashery, was a store that sold men's clothing. They are almost completely extinct now.)

You walked into the store. (Are you still with me?) You make your way to the men's shirts section and you first look for a style that you want. Once you find the style you like, you look for the proper size. After you've found your size you take the shirt into the changing room to try it on. (Aside to my little Gen Z friends: A changing room is a small area in the back where you go behind a curtain and try on clothes before you buy them.)

If you are happy with the way the shirt looks and fits, you hold on to it and, if you want another shirt, you go back to the shirt selection and go through the procedure again. After that, you search for the casual pants section and once again go through the process of locating style and size and then taking your chosen chinos into the changing room to try them on. Once you've decided on what merchandise you want to buy, you take your stuff to the salesperson and you pay for it at the checkout stand.

The salesperson rings up your desired items, adds in the sales tax, folds your new purchases and puts them in a bag, collects the money from you, and off you go back home with shirts and chinos that you know fit you and look good. The entire exercise took less than a couple of hours.

Okay, let's say you're a woman. One day you decide you'd like a couple of pairs of new shoes. You drive to the shoe store. You walk in and look around at the various styles which are displayed around the store. You find a shoe that you want to try on. The shoe salesman (they were all men years ago) comes over to you, asks you to sit down in a chair, he sits down on a little shoe stool in front of you. The salesman measures your foot with a special foot measuring thing that he has you step on and which shows him the length and width of your foot.

He takes the shoe that you want into the back room to search for your proper size. You sit and wait a few minutes. When he returns he has a shoe box (sometimes he brings out two) with the style of shoe you want in your size. He sits back down in front of you and puts the shoe on your foot. He asks you how it feels. If it feels right to you, he will put the other shoe on you and ask you to walk around a little bit.

As you walk around to make sure the shoes fit correctly, you look in the little mirrors, which are placed all over the store, to see if you like the way the shoe looks on you. If you like the shoe and it fits you correctly, the man will hold it for you while you finish shopping for other shoes. You go through the sizing routine with each pair of shoes you think you might buy. When you've made up your mind on the shoes, the salesclerk will take them to the register for you. You pay for them and you leave happily with several pair of new shoes. Since you're a woman in a shoe store, the entire experience might take several hours or the better part of the day.

But here's the thing, in one day the man and woman have the items they wanted. There's no need to return anything because they know for sure that they look right and fit correctly. No waiting for delivery. No trying it on at home only to discover that it doesn't fit or it looks like crap and now you have to download a return label and take the lousy merchandise to a pick-up place in order to get a replacement of a refund to your account.

Yes, my dear Gen Zers, sometimes the old-fashioned ways of doing things were actually much easier and much more efficient. Buying clothes and shoes online is, at best, a crap shoot. And many times all you end up with is nothing but the crap.

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