Forever Twenty-wah?

Last Friday I spent my lunch break hitting the main drag of clothing stores near where I work. I've been on a quest to find nice, affordable, professional clothing ever since I made a considerably upward move in my career (since my preference for jeans and green hi-tops would most likely be frowned upon by my new colleagues). My main conclusion after several attempts: I have trouble understanding why all shopping experiences geared towards young women must resemble epileptic seisures.

Upon entering these stores, the shopper is immediately hit by a blast of loud, usually cacophonous music that, in itself, is an intensely rattling experience. I've noticed this phenomenon before -- it's most obvious in larger department stores, like the flagship Macy's on 34th Street. I once took the escalators up all the way to the top, just to see the really old, wooden escalators on the upper floors. Each floor had its own blend of mild popular music playing at a reasonable level, but you could pinpoint the juniors floor without even seeing the clothes -- thumping, pulsing music must be statistically proven to whip girls and young women into a consumer frenzy.

The second thing to strike me each and every time is the seemingly random, careless arrangement of wares. While some smaller stores with a longer cycle time (i.e. those stores that keep items in stock longer than a few weeks) still organize their apparel by season, occasion, color, or what have you, many stores with a shorter cycle time cram as much fabric as will physically fit into the space. This leads to a whirlwind of colors and shapes without much in the way of rhyme or reason.

The cramming also leads to smaller aisles, with shoppers examining the overloaded displays in single file. When two examiners meet in the middle, they engage in a complex dance of avoidance, either shimmying past one another, or one going around the long, seemingly counterintuitive way to go back to the original cramped space, just slightly further down.

The aural overload, the visual overload, and the claustrophobia combined are still nothing compared to a real seisure, I'd imagine, but I'd love to see the marketing studies that lead apparel stores for young women to adopt such extreme, uncomfortable measures.

Almost makes the American Girl stores seem like a pleasant return to the good old days of shopping as a special event. Not that I would necessarily encourage implementing this level of branded consumerism early on.

What am I talking about. Today's girls have Hannah Montana. It's too late.