The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

I’m not a big shopper, but one thing that has struck me as almost universally true is that the clearance rack in a clothing store is filled almost exclusively with the extreme sizes–your XLs, XXLs, and even the occasional XS. Given that I wear a medium, this means that I very rarely can purchase anything for myself on the cheap.

All that changed today when Michelle and I were shopping at REI for a birthday present for her mother. She visited us in Boston last year and left her windbreaker in my car, and for many silly and largely inexcusable reasons, it took us months to get the POS jacket (honestly, it was a crappy, crappy thing the color of sand) into a package heading for Texas. So we figured that a good gift might be a really nice jacket.

I started modeling the jackets so that Michelle could see how they would look on a human, and I discovered that I can comfortably wear XL women’s outerwear! This is awesome, since many jackets, vests, and other outerwear in both the women’s and men’s sections in REI (and other stores) are pretty much unisex. Outerwear, such as windbreakers, fleeces, and rain jackets, are not generally cut specifically for a woman’s or a man’s form, so as long as I can find a color and style that’s unisex as well, the clearance rack is all mine! Similarly, Michelle can easily fit into a man’s XS!

It turns out that this trick isn’t particularly unique; my wife, on occasion, has purchased unisex clothing such as sports gear from the boy’s section of department stores, since children’s clothing is almost universally cheaper than adult clothing.