I recently decided it was time for a closet clean-out. It’s funny how some garments that may have suited you at a certain age just look ridiculous with the passage of time. Plus, I had been losing some weight and it became very clear the various clothing items I had worn to mask my extra pounds (gained during Covid and two years of recovering from a broken foot), were just not going to work once those extra pounds were gone.
The events I’m going to describe all culminated in a day when I definitely felt like I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, and I began to wonder if I was being filmed for a new version of the show “Candid Camera.” This was a TV show where they would make people think strange and bad things were happening, only to reveal at the end of the skit that it was all staged, and the whole thing was a joke caught on camera. But in my situation, such was not the case.
Source: Leonardo AI image generator
So here’s the thing about getting rid of clothes in my area. You have options. You can simply donate them to Goodwill, which is usually my preferred method because it is so hassle-free. But of course you get nothing back from all of the money you spent acquiring those wardrobe items. So another option is to take them to consignment stores that buy your clothes for resale. The catch is, the consignment stores are inundated with people bringing in their used clothes, so they have very fussy rules, and the amount you earn from bringing your clothes to them is often not enough to cover the cost of the gas to get there.
But this time I had quite a few nice things. So even though I have not had the most rewarding experience with consignment stores in the past, I decided to trust in the system this one time. Plus, I thought I might go shopping for a few new items with the proceeds. I weeded out anything that didn’t look fairly new and fashionable, then packed it all up and went to the consignment store. Let’s just call the first store I went to “The Chic Shop” (not its real name).
I arrived on a Saturday afternoon, pulled my giant pile of items from my car (all carefully arranged on hangers) and walked in the store.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the woman at the counter said with a slightly irritated (and not at all sorry) tone, as if I was perhaps the hundredth person she had to explain this to that day. “Our buying hours are closed for today.” Then she turned away, done with me.
My shoulders slumped. I’d spent the day freshening everything up and getting it ready. I thought I had plenty of time, as it was well before the close of business. I really didn’t want to have to come back another day.
“Couldn’t you just make an exception this time?” I asked. “I drove all the way over here from the other side of town.”
“Sorry, no. Our register turns off. There’s nothing I can do.”
Fine, I thought, as I turned to schlep my stuff back into the car.
“Also,” she said, “please don’t bring clothing in on hangers.”
It was a few weeks before I could get back to The Chic Shop. I took everything off the hangers, placed it into bags, and finally returned to the store. I arrived well within their allotted buying hours, only to discover that although the store was open and it was within the correct time, they were not going to do any buying at that time because it was a holiday weekend.
“Please?” I said to the woman at the counter. “This is my second trip across town to come to your store. I’m here during the stated hours on the door. This isn’t easy for me to schedule. I work full time.”
“Really?” she said with an extremely sarcastic tone. “So do I!”
At that point, I decided I was far too irritated with The Chic Shop, and decided to go to a different chain store. By now the clothing had been in my car for a few weeks, and I was worried I was going to have to freshen it up again.
The other store, which I will call The Clothes Horse, has a very similar business model. I went in to find out their buying hours, and discovered I was there at the appropriate time. However, when I walked in with my bags of clothes, the woman said, “Oh, I’m sorry, but the clothing must be on hangers.”
I emitted a dejected yet all-too-familiar sigh. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll be back.” I did not have the clothing hangers in my car.
It was yet another week before I went back. This brings us to the Very Crabby Day. I freshened up all the clothes, put them all back on hangers, and headed for the store — already a bit tense and wondering what might go wrong this time. But then I found myself doing errands right near another location of The Chic Shop, and thought I might try them first. Maybe I could just get all of my errands done on that side of town and save some gas and running around.
The only trouble was, the clothes were all on hangers as I had been heading for The Clothes Horse. So I stood next to my car, took all the clothes off the hangers, folded them, and took them into the store. They signed me in without incident (miracle of miracles) and I went next door to do another errand while they decided which of my lovely items they would like to buy. However, when I went back, I found that they only wanted three things, and the total amount they paid for them was something like four dollars and twenty nine cents, a tiny fraction of what I had paid for any single item.
“Thank you,” I said in a sullen tone, as I packed up all of the other items, which were now in a heap.
At this point I did what just about anyone else would do, having committed to this process. I put all of the items back on hangers, smoothing them out the best I could, so that I could take them to The Clothes Horse. At this point, I was once again questioning why I was going through all this. My past experiences with these places had been similar, involving a ridiculous amount of time and effort, evidently with the goal to converse with humorless, condescending counter people and receive only a few dollars in my hands at the end of it all. Why did I think it would be any different?
But I simply wasn’t ready to give up. So I drove across town to The Clothes Horse, got out of the car, pulled out all of the items on their hangers and slung the whole stack of stuff over one arm, then marched into the store. I actually worked up a sweat in the process. It was really a lot of clothes!
The woman at the counter greeted me with a tight smile. It was not a friendly look. “So…” she said, drawing out “so” the way people do when they are delaying the delivery of bad news. “We really prefer that you check in here first before bringing in your items.”
I would like to say that I behaved graciously. I am not proud to admit that this was the moment when my patience with this whole ridiculous process ran out and I snapped.
Surely, there were sparks flying straight out of my eyes as I stared at her over the top of my heap of clothing — which had been put on and taken off of hangers and hauled in and out of my car more times than I could count — and said, “So you want me to return to my car with this giant load of stuff, come back in to put my name on a piece of paper, then go back out and collect it all again and bring it back in?”
She didn’t say anything. She literally just stared at me in some bizarre contest of wills.
So I did it. I went out, struggled to open the shop door, struggled to unlock and open the car door with my armloads of stuff, struggled to get all the clothing back inside the car, closed and locked it, went back into the store, filled out the piece of paper, and then went back to the car, collected the clothes again and hefted them all back into the store to go through their buying process. I am not making this up.
The result? Three dollars and fifty nine cents in my hand, and a huge pile of clothing to take back to the car. This story is long enough at this point, so I won’t go into the final episode in which the woman at the counter pretended not to understand that I wanted to spend the proceeds from the items they purchased from me on a blouse I had found while waiting for their “buyer” to sort through my clothing items. But it did not make my experience with The Clothes Horse any more pleasant. And of course I then walked out with zero proceeds and my remaining pile of clothing that seemed to be growing, not diminishing.
The next stop was the Goodwill donation center, where I took all of the clothes back off the hangers and handed them to a worker who tossed them unceremoniously into a large bin where they would begin a new journey. I wished them well. And I guess that’s what I should have done at the beginning.
Maybe now you can see why I thought I might be an unwitting cast member in a silly TV show where a hidden camera operator captures baffled people not understanding why these bizarre things are happening, and someone eventually informs them that they have been duped, and says, “You’re on Candid Camera!” But it sure wouldn’t have surprised me if I was!
Here you can check out one of the episodes!
There is a happy ending to the story, I’m happy to say. I got home from my Very Crabby Day and just as I was turning my car onto the street where I live, I looked up into the sky and saw a rainbow. And that made my day.
Image is my own.
Thank you for reading! The "wrong side of the bed" prompt inspired me.
But wait, there's more. If you have persisted this long, you shall be rewarded with some humor. So... we all love AI image generators, right? Well, here's the prompt I gave to the Leonardo app, hoping to get a picture that somewhat matched my memory of one of the stern and rather unkind clerks at one of the consignment stores I visited:
A crabby woman working at the counter of a retail clothing store.
"Crabby" is of course vernacular for irritated or annoyed. But the Leonardo tool is apparently unaware of this! Here was the result:
Source: Leonardo AI image generator
Photo credits: All of the photos in this post were taken by me and belong to me, unless otherwise noted.
My bio: I am a fiction writer and photographer based in Minnesota. I have had a lifelong love of fiction writing. I earned my MFA in writing from the University of New Hampshire. My short stories have appeared in a range of literary journals and anthologies, and my first short story collection, Somewhere in Minnesota is available on Amazon US as well as international Amazon sites., Barnes & Noble or from the publisher.
Want to know what I'm publishing and where? Visit my website, www.jaynalocke.com, or follow me on X, aka Twitter, at www.twitter.com/@jaynatweets or on Instagram at www.instagram.com/authorjaynalocke.
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