The Po Show

Shop Till You Drop

I've fallen in with another bad crowd.

Actually I've been in with this crowd for almost 5 years, but it's a different part of the crowd. I'm talking about the people on GymboRebel, which started out as a forum for women obsessed with Gymboree. I joined initially as a form of research, to find out which items were considered "hot" (so I could go buy them and resell them on ebay), what lines were coming up and what people thought about them, find out in advance when sales were coming, that sort of thing. I ended up becoming friends with a lot of the people there, and remain so, mostly on Facebook, though most of us have transcended Gymboree and I no longer buy for resale.

What I do buy now is Gap, Hanna Andersson, and Boden (a British clothing brand), so I frequent the parts of the forum devoted to those brands. And the devotees of those brands are every bit as obsessed with upcoming items, sales, and the value of later resale as the Gymboree people ever were, and I've caught the fever, I'm afraid. I spend way too much time checking there to find out what pictures of upcoming SKUs people have uncovered on the net, what sales are coming, what will be included in said sales, what coupons can be combined with what other coupons to maximize savings, etc. It's gotten a little rabid on my part.

And I am a freaking PIKER compared to some of these women.

During all the years I've been on this forum, it's never ceased to amaze me how much some people spend on their kids' clothes. People will start a thread asking how many outfits others have so far for the coming season (outfits, mind you, not individual items of clothing) and there are people whose purchases number over 100, for each kid they have. They start enumerating the number of dresses, each kind of top, each kind of bottom, and it's staggering. People will start a thread about how much people have to ebay each season, and the responses are given in the number of 40 gallon Rubbermaid bins, and sometimes those bins number a dozen or more. Everyone there talks about huge numbers of outfits that only got worn once, or not at all.

These are people with a serious children's clothing addiction. A certain item will sell out in their child's size, and they FREAK OUT, and cannot stop till they have somehow acquired that item. People call the clothing company or the store manager or whoever the vilest of names you can imagine, if they are somehow impeded from purchasing the items they desire. Every once in a while someone will step back and say, "It's only clothes," but somehow that sentiment falls by the wayside again and again.

And I'm wondering why. It's obvious that it is the mother's issue, because while a little girl may choose a twirly dress or a little boy may love a shirt with a funny monster on it, overall younger kids are not going to give a crap what they wear. Where does the need to buy and buy and buy come from? What is it fulfilling? I know that for me, it's often the buying part, the hunt, managing to find the bargain, more than the actual stuff itself. Though I do love to see the outfits on Tessa, my own little dress-up dolly.

And why kids' clothes? I know there are tons of people who spend dizzying amounts on their own clothing, or electronics, or jewelry, or whatever. One woman on the forum said something that I'll never forget: "Lots of people collect things. I collect children's clothes." So maybe there is that element to it, the coveting of items for your collection. It's a different kind of collection, though, because most of the hard-core addicts also ebay their kids' clothing, so it's a temporary collection (with constant replacement). For me, knowing that I'll get back at least something of what I paid for Tessa's clothes (and often as much as I paid or even MORE than I paid), gives me permission to overbuy.

I think the fact that it's their (umm, our) kids' clothes, that also allows people (um, me) to put so much time and effort and money into it. It's for the kids, not yourself, so it's all right, right? Studies show that people often feel badly after they purchase things for themselves, but people almost universally feel good after they purchase things for other people. You get the shopping thrill with less of the post-shopping hangover guilt.

I swear, I would love to write a book about all this. But with all the effort I spend online looking for deals and waiting for new lines to come out, who has the time?