Shopping Roulette

As someone who approaches shopping as part sport, I frequently have to "stalk" particular items that I'm interested in, by waiting for them to go on sale, or by locating them through an alternative source such as eBay or Style Forum. Sometimes, none of these options is successful.

Back in the fall J. Crew had some flannel workshirts. The fabric didn't really feel like traditional flannel to me, but it was still nice and soft, and I liked the patterns, particularly a light gray plaid accented with red. (Gray is pretty much my favorite color for clothing.) I figured I'd pick one up after Christmas when everything from the fall got marked down, but the shirt was sold out on the web site and in stores by around Thanksgiving.

I don't know if this is normal or not, but I suspect that maybe a buyer underestimated the shirt's popularity. I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago in another post, and I thought that was the end of it. But one day last week, while poking around the sale section on the J. Crew web site, the shirt was back, and the only available size was my size, so naturally I ordered one right away.

After I'd placed the order, I wondered if I would actually receive it, because it was sold out again a short time later, and I know that weird things can happen when inventory gets low. I've read stories about canceled orders on blogs like J. Crew Aficionada. (Yes, there are people who devote their time to blogging about one particular store's merchandise, and there are people like me who read such blogs. Deal with it.)

The next day I got the email saying my order had shipped, and I more or less stopped thinking about it. I mean, there's always a chance that the UPS truck could crash, but something like that's pretty remote. On Friday I checked the tracking and saw that that package would be delivered that day. Someone in my office brought it by my desk around 3 PM. I opened the package and... they had sent me a different shirt. Not just a different one, but one I'd never seen before on the web site, in a catalog, or in a store. It was a flannel shirt, but it wasn't gray, and it was a completely different style.

I called customer service, and sadly the shirt I wanted was not available anywhere, but since they had made a mistake they refunded my shipping cost, and I returned the wrong shirt to the Copley store on my way home from work. Guess I'll just have to keep looking.