As the cold of winter was beginning to approach my wife decided to analyze my long-sleeved shirts, and it was decided that I need some replacements. I will say that one of the things I dread is shopping for clothes, mostly because I don’t really know what goes with what, although I did learn a trick from my Aunt and that was simply to look at the mannequins. Why? The stores aren’t going to dress them to look like crap, so if you pick out some clothes similar to the mannequins you will usually do fine.
As it turned out my wife and I found ourselves at Macy’s, you know, the store that has the Thanksgiving Day Parade, and much like most trips to Macy’s I found myself consistently just wondering how much something was going to cost. If part of their marketing is to confuse the customer what the final price of a purchase will be, I believe they are the winner, hands down.
You see, there I was in the men’s department by myself as my wife was off in her area looking for some things she needed. My quest: Find about four shirts. My secondary quest: Not pay too much. The problem with the latter quest was I wouldn’t know how much things were until the final bill was tallied. Why? First there is their signage. Macy’s seems to be having about 80 different promotions going at one time. Fine, maybe not 80, but one sign mentioned items being 20% off with your Macy’s card, another sign had items at 30% off, but you could take another 20% or something with your Macy’s card, there was a rack of shirts that the sign said were marked 75% off, only the price tags were at 50% off, and there was a contraption rack with a hodgepodge of clothes on top that might have been 40% off, shirts that had a sign on one side mentioning 30% off, but no sign on the other side. I had to do the next thing that makes me cringe at a store, ask for help, and as I checked with Skippy what the price was on the shirts on the other side of the kiosk, he mentioned they were the same price as those on this side, although there was a slight hint of “I think” in his voice.
I found some shirts, my wife returned to me finding the choices acceptable, and the next stage of “How much does this cost?” began as now it was time to whip out the coupons, the Macy’s card, and have the dude at the counter have his own coupon to try and see if you can now pay even less.
Yes, being a Macy’s card holder you receive coupons, and a lot of them. Herein lies the problem – If you don’t have a magnifying glass to read the fine print on exactly what the coupon won’t apply to, or can memorize all of the exclusions, you really have to just go to the checkout with your coupons and have the clerk scan each one to see if they will work on your items, only to find some work, some don’t, and maybe this other coupon works on this other item, but not on this item, followed by the clerk maybe have a “special, today only coupon” that seems to supersede all other coupons, giving you an even better deal, maybe, because at this point you really aren’t sure what coupon applied to what, and maybe now that the clerk scanned their coupon it wasn’t as good a deal as your coupon with your Macy’s card discount that may or may not apply. And while you are there at the check-out scanning all of your coupons, the customers behind you wait impatiently for their turn to check out and find out what their magical final tally will be.
It turns out those shirts on the 75% rack were actually 75% off even if the price tag read different and wasn’t marked correctly, the clerk did have a coupon superseding some of the other coupons, I think, and you couldn’t get 20% off of something with your Macy’s card because you either got one or the other, the coupon discount or the card discount, or the price was just made up.
Did I get a good deal? Who knows? I guess everything was on sale, sort of, in one way or another, but if you go into Macy’s saying “I’m only going to spend “X” amount of dollars, good luck trying to tally things up before you get to the counter. Don’t forget, the clerk might have coupon, too.
That’s it for this one! L8R!!