A fish out of retail water

I love LLBean. Really! If you ask, I will gladly show you the tags that prove that statement.

For instance, I have their version of a French sailor’s shirt in every color — probably because I have this idea that the horizontal stripes balance out the rest of my body.

Of course that is a stretch, but hope springs eternal and LLBean reaps the profit.

Seriously, I appreciate the quality of their clothing, their no shipping charge and the fact that they will take anything back, even after years of wear.

And, if you call them, the women who answer the phone are in Maine and sound just like your neighbors, engaging you in a friendly conversation while they are handling your query.

All in all, a good experience.

That is not the same as going to their store in Fayetteville.

Now this has nothing to do with the store itself or its employees, rather it has to do with the people who I believe shop there. While I go there to find something to wear, it does seem to me that the other people in the store are far more serious, being more fit and having experiences in the outdoors that go beyond a walk in the park.

They speak kayaks, snowshoes, skiing and other languages foreign to me.

They ask questions about buoyancy, about temperature ranges while I am asking if a particular shirt comes in my size. I do have the feeling that I am the odd person out, the interloper who is nibbling around the sincerity of healthy outdoorsy folks.

It is not the first time that I have been intimidated by a shopping experience.

Several years ago, my daughter, who is very much into nutrition and such, gave me a gift certificate to a health food store. It took me a while to get up the nerve to go there, and when I arrived, all of my neophyte fears were confirmed.

I had no idea what most of the products were for. At one gondola two men were discussing the merits of a product that had no counterpart in any store I had ever been in.

I couldn’t figure out whether you ate it or rubbed it on somewhere. I simply looked knowingly at the item and walked away.

Wandering around the store, I settled on some infused beeswax salve for dry hands, a carob bar — why carob when chocolate is so much better?  It seemed like the knowledgeable thing to do.

Having a lot of gift certificate still remaining and noticing that the store also had a small “coffee shop,” I cautiously ordered a chocolate flavored smoothie, according to its description also having in its ingredients all kinds of seeds and stuff that you only see listed on bottles of laxatives.

Hey,  I had a gift certificate to use up and I did question the barista about its effects.

She assured me that it was a neutral amount of loosening agents that wouldn’t affect my innards negatively.

It was awful. Just awful. If there was chocolate in that drink, it was the kind that tastes scrapings from the underside of a entryway rug. YUK.

But there were all these intensely serious people eating and drinking there. What did they know that I didn’t?  Was I out of my element. You bet.

I still have money left on that gift certificate. I will have to do some educating of myself before I go back.

Then there was the time when, wearing my really ratty winter coat, I decided to Christmas shop in one of the high end stores in the mall.

I have to set the picture for you. I rarely shopped in this store. The few times that I did revolved around the necessity to find something very special for a family member’s birthday or special event.

It was not WalMart or Wegmans or Macy’s or the BonTon or reaching back even further, Deys or Edwards. I was a fish out of retail water.

My coat was at least 10 years old, with much of its once blue color faded from use and washings. The pockets had holes in them. Anything that you put in them wound up wandering around the lining, making, odd clinking sounds, change meeting change somewhere in the back.

Apparently the rest of me and my coat set off alarms, at least silent ones, because it didn’t take long for me to notice that I was being followed by a store employee.

At first I thought I was imagining this, but after a trip to the restroom, the same person hovered near me as I perused the sweaters in men’s wear.

Now, I did stand out, if you compare what I looked like to the beautifully coiffed and attired women who shopped at the same time. Did I mention that I had just gotten over the flu?

This only added to my lack of gravitas. I had always thought that I didn’t really belong in this store. My clothes were not of the same quality as those on the racks and I lacked what seemed to me to be the self-assured attitude of other shoppers who knew salespeople by name.

Instead of, “Sally, has my crepe de chine gown come in?”  I might ask, “ Excuse me, do you have this in a larger size?”

I mean, asking for a size 12 seemed to flout store policy on upper end sizing. Truthfully, though they did and do have an area for larger sizes, always staffed by people under 5 feet tall and weighing no more than 80 pounds.

Do you get the picture?

Even with two master’s degrees and a lifetime of pretending that I know what is going on, I find myself easily troubled in certain situations.

I am also unsettled by large grocery stores that require a map to find the yogurt.

I am equally dismayed by parking lots that require a GPS to find your car once you have finished shopping.

Which is why I find it so satisfying to sit here in my PJ’s and comfy bathrobe typing away.

No one to compare myself with except the cat and I have already acknowledged him to be far superior and let it go at that.