Expense Report #2

Aside from food, drugstore, and household items, I did make a couple of discretionary purchases this week.

The Mrs. needed to go to a craft store one night, and rather than wait in the car or follow her around the craft store in mopey boredom, I opted to venture into the depths of the Kmart next door. Kmart is like hell on earth to me; I have never been in one that even approached being pleasant (though we did go in one with the Mrs.' sister one time out in California that was almost bearable). But I hadn't been in that one in several years, and this one in longer, so I was a little curious: had anything changed? Would there be anything I might consider buying?

The answer to the first question was no, nothing had changed; if anything, the store had gotten drearier since my last time there, and it also seemed smaller. The answer to the second question, surprisingly, was yes, because I found multi-packs of gray undershirts. Several months ago I mentioned seeing these on the Kmart web site, but I never bothered to order them, and the site led me to believe that these were not carried in the stores. But there they were, $10 for a package of four. I still hadn't resolved the undershirt problem from back in November, so I bought two packages and got out of there as quickly as I could.

I also ordered a shirt from the Gap web site, after trying unsuccessfully to find it in stores. I've been after a red chambray shirt for about two years now. I wasn't interested in paying the $150 or whatever it was Polo was charging for the RRL one they sold last year, and by the time I discovered it, it was sold out everywhere anyway. J. Crew introduced one earlier this spring for $98, still too high. Gap's just came out a week or two ago, and it's $49.50. Now we're talking.

But wait, it gets better. Because I have a Gap credit card (actually Banana Republic, so same thing), I get lots of offers and coupons for discounts. This week they were offering 30% off from Thursday through today. I went looking for the shirt after work the other day, but the stores don't seem to have it in yet, so in order to get the discount I went ahead and placed an online order. I like the flapped pockets on the Gap shirt, but I'm getting tired of the extended throat tab--it just gets in the way. Next weekend I'm going to visit the tailor with the shirts I own that have one to have them removed.

(To those of you who might be inclined to suggest that I might have waited for the next discount offer from Gap, you're not necessarily wrong, but the way their product turns over, it's a very real possibility that by then I wouldn't be able to find my size, and I had to weigh that against whether or not to spend the money now.)