Simpson’s episode: Bart is at Itchy & Scratchy Land in the gift shop.
I was reminded of this episode today - the idea that stores always seem to have everything except the item you’re looking for.
So what’s the deal with Target never having men’s size medium shirts in stock? I’m looking for a simple polo shirt. They have a whole table of them. I see a color I like - o.k., do they have it in a size medium? Hmmm…5 small, 12 large, 15 extra large, but no medium. O.K., no biggie - I’ll just go with my second color choice. 7 small, 14 large, 17 extra large, and no medium. Not even one. It’s a pretty common size. It’s the size that medium sized men wear, and there are a lot of us. I did actually find a medium-sized shirt on that table, but it was a color no self-respecting human would wear in public.
O.K., I get it - they don’t have any because they sold them all. Medium is obviously the most popular size, so they sell so quickly that one can effectively never find it in a normal color.
So to the people who order clothing for Target stores:
Is there some reason why you couldn’t order MORE of the items people buy a lot of, and LESS of the items people DON’T buy a lot of?
When you look on the shelf and see 15 extra large shirts and no medium shirts, does this cause any of your neurons to fire? Or do you perhaps have OCD and can’t bring yourself to order an “uneven” number of shirts?
When you “order” T-shirts (for example) you generally don’t order by size. You normally get a pre-set assortment. My experince in retail was the small never sells, and XL runs out 1st. Most Men are actually a “large” not a “Medium”.
So, the only way to get more “mediums” is to also order more smalls, L, and XL.
This is why you often see sale racks with odd assortment of sizes, often just the extremes.
Thus, it’s not stupidity on the part of Target. Most men are actually a “large” not a “Medium”.
Why do you think medium is the most popular size? My smallest guy friend - about 5’6", 150lbs, wears a large, and it is not big on him. I know this because I give him my larges that I get as gifts, or ones that seem to fit in the store but are too small when I get home.
Almost everyone else I know where XL or multiples Xs.
That was my experience in retail clothing as well. Our buyer would place an order for tops in a certain style, and we’d get five tops, one each of 16, 18, 20, 22, and 24. Sometimes an order would include two size 20s. The buyer couldn’t buy four size 24s, a couple each of 20s and 22s, and no 16s or 18s, unless she wanted to pay a much higher price per item. Some manufacturers only went to size 24, and of the ones who would make clothes in larger sizes, they frequently offered only a few styles in the larger sizes. If the buyer had been able to get us more of the larger sizes, we would have been able to sell them. However, the manufacturers, for their own reasons, would not allow this.
We could and did take inventory of the foundation garments, to see which styles we needed and in what sizes. The buyer could order specific sizes of specific sizes of bras, girdles, and other foundations. Levi Strauss would also let us order specific sizes of pants in the basic colors, which were white, black, brown, and navy. We could not order specific sizes in the fashion colors, though, so once we had sold out of that season’s green, for instance, we couldn’t get more in by the usual system.
I’m a big guy. XXXL everything, and while I make no claims to being an Adonis, I’m pretty sure all my bits are in proportion - no ridiculously long or short limbs or anything like that. So…
I never had any trouble buying clothes. I could walk into any store, and know they’d have a shirt that would fit me. There was a MR BIG store in Sydney, but I only shopped there if I chanced by anyway - I could buy any clothes I wanted anywhere.
But not shoes.
Big people, apparently, did not wear shoes. Until I was in my early twenties, I could spend a morning going to all the shops and finding maybe one pair my size, or I could go to a specialist store in the city. Then one day, almost overnight, the problem went away. I can now buy big shoes everywhere.
The other weird one is secondhand clothing. Apparently nobody over a medium ever donates to charity shops. Everything they have is medium.
This kinda helps me out because I’m a small (hell, the sweater I’m wearing right now was a small at Target) and come clearence time, I almost always have one in my size. Finally, being scrawny starts to pay off!
I find that same situation with my daugher who is small for her age. I will look on websites for clearance items and they nearly always have one size left and it is hers! It is a beautiful thing and an offset to instances when I look for adult clearance sizes which they never have in my average size.
Yeah, I hate that. I’m quite a bit bigger than I’d wish to be, and I have trouble finding any secondhand clothing that works for me. I’ve decided that all fat women are just as cheap as I am, and therefore a) snap up all the random fat clothes that wander into secondhand shops before I get there, and b) wear their clothes until they actually fall apart, like I do, and therefore have no clothing to donate to secondhand shops.
If you think you wear a medium, get a large anyway. Cheap clothes shrink so much these days… Every shirt I’ve bought in the last year, that I thought was my size, shortened down to a belly shirt after the first washing.
I wonder if the medium dearth in stores/glut in secondhand shops might be related the ‘medium is the average size’ perception. People who are buying gifts for men whose size they don’t know will buy medium since that’s ‘average’ and the guy is ‘average’, right? Then the guy gets the ill-fitting gift and sends it off to the second hand shop, thus creating a glut on that market.
My roommate and I live in men’s medium tshirts from Target (not the polos or anything- the actually tshirts from that big wall that has all of the graphic tees), so I think you might just be right (they’re always tight on the boobs, but fit so comfortably everywhere else. And they’re long! Why did they stop making women’s shirts that go lower than the belly button? ).
Target’s “medium” is Large anywhere else, especially in their button-down or dress shirts. I actually went through this very thing yesterday, trying to add a few extra cheap pieces to my office wardrobe. They had NO M’s anywhere, but a million of every other size.
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