Coat Factory?

I hate malls. I really, really hate malls, so I very rarely go into one.

Yesterday I was out doing errands and I happened to drive past this store that I'd never noticed before "Casual Male XL". Now, my Dad is an XL kinda guy. He's not fat, but he's TALL, and clothes in the regular men's stores just don't fit him well.

Dad had a jacket stolen (or he lost it) a few months ago, and he's been kvetching about it ever since. It was a nice heavy cotton jacket - just a nice lightweight spring jacket. A fishing jacket, sort of.

Anyhow - I figured this would be something nice I could get for him - so I swung into the parking lot and looked around the store. Well, I tried to look around the store. Unfortunately, just like at Radio Shack, apparently the Casual Male XL store has a "chick alert alarm" that lets them know there is a FEMALE IN THE STORE!!! and all hands came running on deck to get me helped and out of there so they could do their "guy things" in the store again. *snicker*

Well, Casual Male XL did not have the jacket I wanted. They had a nice jacket that would have been fine had it not been made out of some slippery-slick material that even I wouldn't wear, and I know my 83 yr old Dad wouldn't even touch. The other jackets weren't anywhere near what I wanted. But the nice guy with 2 earrings suggested I go across the street to the mall to the "Burlington Coat Factory", so after I got done with the rest of my errands, I went back and stopped in at the mall where the Burlington Coat Factory store is.

I walked in, all set to see racks and racks of clothes. I knew from their commercials that they didn't just sell coats, so I figured this would look like a warehouse full of all kinds of clothing.

Imagine my surprise when I walked in - to a department full of glass chochkes and housewares!
I almost walked back out to check and see if the name over the door was "Sears" or something. Maybe I'd become "Gonzales'ed" and "did not recall" where I had been going and walked in the wrong door?

There wasn't a single coat in sight. There wasn't anything that even resembled a coat. Nothing you could USE as a coat. Hell, there wasn't even anything you could take apart and reassemble as a coat! NOBODY uses glass ashtrays as coats!

I finally found the menswear department, and while I still haven't seen anything in that store that qualifies as a "coat", I did find a couple of lightweight jackets that I didn't think my Dad would turn up his nose at too badly, and the prices were outrageously inexpensive, so I got them both. I figure if he doesn't like them, he can take them back to the Burlington Not-Exacty-a-Coat Factory down by him.

This weird inappropriate naming seems to be becoming more prevalent. We had a small chain of stores around here at one point called "Waccamau Pottery". You'd think you could buy a lot of nice dishes and planting pots, huh? Well, for a while they did have the dishes, but I still don't get how soap, candles, dishcloths, furniture, backpacks and yes, occasionally COATS could be called "pottery".

Ya gotta wonder...


638 days