Spending My Christmas Cash

While we were visiting my family for Christmas, my sister mentioned that she thought I should ease back on the shopping stuff I talk about here. I understood what she was saying, and I probably should have explained to her that a significant portion of my weekly visitors are folks who find their way to me via the link graciously posted on The Choosy Beggar.

While style and shopping are not the only topics I choose to write about, I feel I should be providing a certain amount of content that will (hopefully) be of interest to those visitors. Besides, style and shopping are things I care about and spend a lot of time thinking about and doing, but I can also appreciate the idea of trying to maintain some balance.

With that bit of housekeeping out of the way, you may have noticed that I haven't really had much to say about shopping and clothes and stuff during the past couple of weeks. In fact, I had been trying not to shop, even in the midst of all the post-holiday sales going on. I guess I'm just trying to approach the new year with a bit more restraint, but I knew that I would end up doing some shopping eventually.

My parents typically give us money for Christmas, and we usually deposit it into our joint account until we figure out something to use it toward. This year we decided to split it up and use it on ourselves individually. On Saturday we set out for South Shore Plaza, where we hadn't been for several years—I think it's possible that the last time I was there, the Filene's was still open.

We had a couple of reasons for choosing to go to that mall in particular. For one, my brother and sister gave us a Back Bay Restaurant Group gift card for Christmas, and there's a Joe's Bar and Grill in the mall, so we knew we could eat when we were finished shopping. I also wanted to visit the Sterlingwear store, which I had recently learned about from an ad that ran on NECN in December.

Sterlingwear is an apparel manufacturer located in East Boston--yes, that's right, actual garment making going on right within the city limits—pretty cool. I had been thinking about getting a pea coat, and Sterlingwear has been the official supplier to the US Navy for more than 40 years. I was more interested in the made-in-USA aspect of their business, and the advantage of being able to try on the coats to get the right size. (They also have a store in Nashua, NH.)

Sterlingwear makes several different styles of pea coat, with minor differences in cut, collar, details like number of buttons and whether or not there is a back vent, and type of lining, making an in-person inspection of the merchandise even more important to me. The coat with the heaviest lining felt too bulky, and I wasn't necessarily looking for the warmest coat I could get; I was thinking of the pea coat as more of an in-between coat. The one with eight buttons instead of six was cut an inch or so shorter and didn't look quite right: the shoulders were too wide, and I didn't care for its more stand-up style of collar.

Eventually I determined that I preferred the style called Navigator, with a satin lining and slightly less padded shoulders. I wasn't necessarily planning on buying it right at that moment, but I was told by the store clerks that all their coat prices are increasing $50 on February 1. If that was said just to get a sale, then it worked; if it's true (I have no reason to think otherwise), then I saved some money.

I did have to make one compromise: the other styles were available in a nice heathery medium gray, which I really liked, because I like gray in general and you don't typically see pea coats in gray. But the Navigator is not stocked in the gray; I could have ordered it, but it would have cost an extra $20 and I would have had to wait for it to be made. So I chose to get mine in black.

If you are interested in this type of coat, Sterlingwear offers them in a wide variety of sizes for men and women, and all styles are available in short, regular, and long. I assumed I would need a long, as I tend to in suits and sport jackets, but I found that the sleeves were too long. Both sleeves and body length were just right with a regular, though I did have to go up one size from my normal jacket size to get a comfortable fit through the torso.

Over the weekend I also bought a couple of things from the sale section of Lands' End Canvas (online; I don't know why I didn't think to go into Sears and check out the LEC sale stuff when I was at the mall). I got a J. Crew gift card from my brother and an L.L. Bean gift card from my mother, both of which I'll use eventually. I did check out the J. Crew in the mall, and it looked like it might be on the verge of closing; there was hardly any sale merchandise left, and an awful lot of bare shelf space overall. Even if it's just because they'd sold most of their fall stuff, the spring merchandise is usually starting so show up by this point.

In fact, there were a noticeable number of empty storefronts in the South Shore Plaza. Boston.com ran a story the other day on the state of things at the Atrium and the Mall at Chestnut Hill, but they might want to send those reporters down to Braintree, because I don't think these retail vacancy issues are confined to Newton.