Just dropping in a quick two-for-one note on my vacation shopping extravaganza for my wardrobe reboot. Three days, $550, 16 shirts, 2 pants, shoes, socks and undershirts. I don’t think that’s too bad since I haven’t shopped for clothes in literally years. Day one was my old standby, a tiny factory store plaza that no one really cares about. The shops are really having a rough go there. There’s only two that I bought anything from. But the plaza was empty, which was awesome. Day two, I hit Tampa premium outlets. Not busy, but definitely not empty either. I found this surprising on a Tuesday morning. Day three was two Orlando premium outlets and… HOLY. SHIT.
I arrived at the first one a half hour after opening and the parking lots were full. Not can’t-find-any-parking full, but you’re-going-to-have-to-walk full. This is a Wednesday morning. There are a ton of people here. I thought tourism numbers were cratered for Florida? I thought the economy was a disaster? I thought no one had money or jobs. Where did all these damn children come from? Isn’t school back in session??
That was shocker #1. #2 was seeing queues leading into stores. They’re empty queues, but still. You have to be escorted into Prada, Versace, and a few others. I don’t know if this is a security thing now, where you can’t be trusted to browse a high-end store due to shoplifters or if it’s some "exclusivity" bullshit. Either way, it’s not my thing AT ALL, so I just keep on going to stores that are for people like me.
About halfway through my trip, I see another store with a queue, and the queue is FULL of people – and it’s looping back on itself! It’s the Disney Character Warehouse. I have memories of this store from my ex-wife, who was a Disney fanatic. It was never like this when I used to get dragged there. What the hell is going on?
After lunch, I went to the second outlet. This was like the other one but on steroids. Now we’re in the can’t-find-any-parking situation. I ended up parking behind the outlets where the employees park and had to walk all the way around to get to the entrance. There was easily double the number of people, I had to dodge left and right to make my way through the throngs of people and the few stores I did get into had crowds. I bought nothing and left for home. This is a Wednesday!
And now for part two. As fate would have it, I got my answer on WTF was going on at the Disney store later in the evening via this video posted on social media. A woman was at the character warehouse and was expressing incredulity that all the other shoppers were running livestreaming shopping shows. These people would show an item from the store on their stream, the stream viewers would indicate they wanted it, and the streamer would buy it for the viewer – I assume there is a markup involved here as well. And what you ended up with is 20-30 people doing QVC in a store and their shopping carts are literally overflowing with merchandise.
This is the next evolution of "flipping". What used to happen is, you would source a great deal, buy it all up, then sell it at a profit. There’s risk to that, because maybe it won’t sell at a price that has a good return or even sell at all. And flippers are the worst. Before they existed, there was an actual desire to help other people. You would find a good deal and you would pass along that information so that the people that really needed the product could get it for cheaper. Somewhere along the way, someone said, "why shouldn’t I get something out of this?" and thus, flipping was born (along with affiliate links).
Now the latest generation of flippers is intent on removing the risk of making the purchase up front. They want the sale in-hand before they commit their money. So now, the only investment for the flipper is time, and they get paid for that too, because the livestream can pay out too. And underpinning all of this is rabid consumerism, my hatred of which is well-documented here. Disney has ALWAYS left a bad taste in my mouth because being in their brand stores was like, here’s a pencil. We’ve put the Mickey ears on it so it’s instantly worth twice as much. Do that with any (and I mean ANY) other product and you have the Disney store experience. And people believe it. It’s more valuable because it has a brand on it.
Reflecting on that kind of brings me full circle to my fashion style, Old Money. One of the tenets of that style is to have high quality clothing that doesn’t scream the brand name. One of the stores I dropped in was Michael Kors, who I think has some nice designs, but when I went in, everything had huge "MICHAEL KORS" and "MK" labelling on it. I was disgusted and walked out. It’s the same with Calvin Klein – you can get stuff that’s garish or you can get stuff that’s understated. I’ve never understood why people pay to be a billboard.
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