Why do you loathe The Gap?

amro: their business practices are pretty lousy; they've been accused of basically using slave labour. Which is why their stuff is supposedly affordable. I don't know if they've cleaned up recently, but I suspect pretty much everyone in the mass-market garment industry is fairly environmentally / socially vile in some respect so... what's to be done? I mean besides learning to sew myself, which I've tried before and am useless at.

*conflicted*

Well, their use of child labor is one reason I try to avoid shopping there.

That said, congrats on the dress! I know (man do I) how hard it can be to find something that is both affordable and works.

i bought this dress last week! you will love it! it's surprisingly light and machine washable!

The GAP ACT pisses me off. You know, how they assign sales staff to you as you walk in (women staff for men shoppers, men staff for women shoppers; they probably have special algorithms for figuring sexual preference into the mix) and encourage them to include flirtation as part of the sales patter? It's all part of the manual they make you read when you sign up.

I fucking hate being profiled. I look a little like a cop when I'm wearing a suit, and everybody acts differently around me than if I'm wearing my usual work pants and a t-shirt. If only manners mattered as much as appearances. Do I have to go around naked for people to see who I really am?

Cute dress, by the way. Congratulations.

HJ, yea I definitely know what you mean by the GAP ACT, fortunately I was able to fend it off this go. If I shopped there more frequently than once every 5-7 years, I'm sure it would piss me off more.

in all honesty, I think I've reached the age that I've become immune to the doe-eyed vapid young androgynes they use for this. I mean, yea, one wandered up and attempted to ply its wiles upon me, but I pretty much just marched along to the rack, found what I wanted and got the hell out of there.

it helps that I rarely, if ever, browse. I practise surgical-strike ninja raid shopping, if only because I hate shopping to a degree that I just can't explain in words.

Hm, now I'm curious to visit a Gap and see how that algorithm works. If it's on the money, they can have my business.

I used to manage a Discovery Channel Store; we had a whole handbook of ways to get the most out of our sales staff. Most of it was about making them comfortable with starting conversations with indifferent shoppers, but some of it was "remember to push similar products" or "try to keep them in the store... five minutes more averages to one more item at the register...." Most of it was loss prevention -- if someone's there to shoplift, you can usually drive them out by being pleasant to and conscious of them.

I threw the handbook out the window and told my people to send shoppers elsewhere if we lacked what they needed (they always came back for something else and usually mentioned how helpful that was, "Not like other stores"); I told them to leave alone people like me who just want to shop, but to clean up after them to prevent theft (shoplifters move things around a lot); I constantly talked about the crap that our store sold: what it was for, where it was made, the science/history behind it, why someone would use it, etc.

Yeah, it wasn't clothes retail, where flattery is all, but being engaged and interested in the customer isn't some handbook thing, and it shows. This routine flirting that store clerks are trained into has got to be damaging to their ability to flirt in real life. Reducing transactions to sex may end up reducing sex to a transaction.

Cue big-picture bug-out with me running around, my hair on fire.

Okay, I'm back. The people I managed acted like real people. When a customer would ask about something they didn't know about, they would say, "I don't know. Let me ask Hugh, or Drew, or Boo." Sometimes, when pressed, they'd say, "I'm not really interested in astronomy, so it's hard for me to answer your question. But TC over there knows everything; I'll go get her for you."

During my tenure as manager, our store jumped from #75 in company-wide sales to #2, exceeding our goals by 340%. I sold a lot of telescopes.

I don't know why I'm going on about this, except that:

- I value good, human customer service, in which the customer is respected and not turned into a number or a type. Because I value good service,

- I hate shopping.

Wolfdog, you and I need to go to Hamburger Mary's if you're ever in the Denver area. It definitely dances to the tune of trash-o-fabulous, with a heavy side of GLBT innuendo, but god DAMN they train their waitstaff well there, and the food is fantastic. I've only been in there 2 or 3 times but I can see the place becoming a habit (and not just for the gaudy techno danceclub vibe, which I'll admit to being a total sucker for) The server I had last night was one of the best waiters I've encountered in years. I think he actually is a mind reader. He got a $10 tip on a $25 bill and honestly deserved more.

Well, I would never say no to a culinary and cultural experience of that magnitude. Or any invitation to chow down, really, you know.

Several people (including my wife) have derided the Hamburger Mary's in our 'hood as one of the worst dinner places ever.

I have never heard of Hamburger Mary's. And have never once been addresses by a salesclerk upon entering a Gap.

Speaking of burgers, this seems like such a great business model, I am surprised that there are not a lot of them everywhere.

The designer catsups were awesome.