New York Shopping

Shopping was a somewhat bizarre and frustrating experience. For one shop assistants don’t fulfil their job titles and have little interest in assisting you. So you would ask the guy standing in uniform at the front of the shop, only to find that he was the security guard and also had no interest in assisting you. Every store that sold goods of some value employed a security guard. I soon learned to recognise them as the ones standing at the front of the store wearing expressions of unapproachable, utter boredom.
I also discovered a new concept in shopping. After selecting a cool pair of ¾ length jeans for the bargain price of $8 I wandered round and round the store looking for the changing rooms. When I enquired of their whereabouts I was told they didn’t have any. I looked at the attendant incredulously ‘what do you mean you don’t have changing rooms – how are you supposed to know whether the clothes are going to fit you?’ One look at the line at the ‘exchange and returns’ counter told me the answer to this question. Having been everything from a size 2 to 8, I wasn’t going to risk the guess so put my $8 jeans back on the rack.
Daphies and Filines Basement offered designer clothing at up to 70% discounts. After seeing the garments on offer my opinion of designers has gone way down. I have never seen such an assortment of hideous clothing under the disguise of ‘Tommy Hilfeiger’ or ‘Dolce and Gabbana’. Including shirts that should you be crazy enough to wear one you would disappear into camouflage should you stand in front of the curtains at your 1960’s Waihi Beach bach. I’m sure if you had a spare 3 hours or so you could filter through the racks of crap and find a bargain but I didn’t have the patience for such a quest. If a popular chain store had a sale you had to prepare yourself for mayhem. It would be hard to find any order in the racks. Size 1 to size 20, shorts, t shirts, lime green and black. They would all be there jammed up together and you would be in competition with hundreds of other women all scrambling to find a bargain amongst the crap. The queues to the changing rooms would go half way through the stores and even had me considering finding a quiet area where I could quickly duck behind a few racks and change. The guys queues would be much shorter but Warren couldn’t even be bothered with those and would just whip off his shirt right there. Guys have it good sometimes.

Having got through the stages of finding a piece of clothing that you like, getting through the queue to try it on and deciding to purchase your item you then had the checkouts to contend with. Some stores, like Gap, had a good system with 15 or 20 registers but only 1 queue with a fast-talking, unfriendly guy at the front directing you to a numbered checkout. The biggest supermarket I saw had 35 checkouts.

As you can probably tell, I was not overly impressed by the people working in the retail industry. It was probably the worst service I have ever come across. Overall, they were rude, unfriendly and unhelpful. Most of the time they wouldn’t even smile let alone acknowledge your presence. And don’t expect the girls at the counter to stop their conversation about what they are going to wear to Saturday’s party to telly your purchases. I even bought some groceries in complete silence – the girl didn’t even tell me how much it cost at the end. At another grocery store, as I walked up to checkout 5 where there was nobody in line, the lady at the neighbouring checkout saw me approaching and told me to go to number 3. Somewhat confused at this I went to number 3 where there was no operator and the girl at number 4 said her checkout was closing. So I went back to the original checkout and questioned the girl who seemed clueless about why her neighbour told me to change lanes (not that she was apologetic about it or anything).