Winter Clearance

I had two or three post ideas rattling around in my head while I was on my way to work yesterday, but by the time I arrived I couldn't remember any of them.

Anyway, I guess the perennial fallback topic is clothes and shopping. I've been intending to hit the Wrentham outlets since right after Christmas, but with weather and travel we never made it. By now it may be too late to find anything good. I've been making an effort to be a bit more choosy about what I buy, and since the beginning of the year I haven't bought much (for me, anyway).

Last week I read on a shopping site that all the clearance merchandise at Saks stores around the country had been collected and sent to six stores, and Boston is one of them, so I thought it would be a good idea to pop in and have a look. I don't do much shopping in Saks--I think the only things I've ever actually purchased there are grooming products like shaving cream--but they have a pretty good selection of men's clothing spanning the spectrum from classic Italian suits to more trendy young-dude threads.

I went Monday after work, but unfortunately I was disappointed. Clearance stuff is usually on clearance for a reason, and the stuff on the sale racks was unimpressive. I did, however, see several nice things that weren't on sale, which is pretty much what happens to me everywhere I shop. I guess there's hope that those things might eventually go on sale, or show up on Gilt or RueLaLa.

Since I was on my way home from work, I had to walk through Copley Place anyway to get to the Orange Line, so I stopped in J. Crew. I did pretty well in their stores' sale sections in December, both around here and on my microvisit to New York (the stores in Rockefeller Center and on Fifth Avenue below Union Square have particularly good men's departments), and I was hoping for some additional markdowns.

So I was kind of surprised to find that there was no longer a men's sale section in the Copley Place store. There was a small section of women's sale stuff, and that was it. I guess it's possible for a store to sell all of its sale/clearance merchandise, but I think it's more likely that after a certain date, whatever is left gets sent to an outlet store (so maybe I should get to Wrentham after all).

There was one flannel shirt I really liked from the fall, but it sold out even before December. I know this because it disappeared from the stores and the web site and I couldn't find it anywhere, so I asked a store employee about it. I saw the character Andy wearing it on the show Parks and Recreation, and while I don't think that's why it sold out, of course it only made me want it more. Yeah, I really am that weird about clothes sometimes.