Gifting: Shopping aesthetics

A bit of a tangent to this series, but . . .

My wife and I spent five hours shopping yesterday, which is pretty unusual for us. It was our first time to the mall in longer than we could remember. We had a few stops on our list. Banana Republic wasn’t one of them, but we ended up there and found some sales, some clothes for a wedding in January.

I used to shop Banana Republic regularly when I lived in Nebraska. Their sales on men’s clothes were significant. I regularly found wool dress pants marked down from $90 to $10. I bought a wool sports coat for $20 on sale five years ago or so.

The sales at the store here in Fayetteville are meager in comparison; I don’t remember if I’ve ever bought anything down here.

I remembered the reason I liked shopping there, besides good clothing on sale, this weekend. The store is well designed. Merchandise isn’t so crammed onto racks and shelves like it is in department stores. There is, so to speak, white space. The shopping experience is simply superior if you can’t afford boutiques on Fifth Avenue, or if you haven’t made a commitment to buy handmade. Other stores are set up similarly, such as Express, Lerner New York and Structure.

So long as the sales are good, I’d pick these stores over a department store any day.