Shopping, Advertising and Consumers

Story · all 20 words

The Coat and the Returns Desk

The coat cost one hundred and eighty pounds, which was and still is the most I have ever spent on a single item of clothing, and I bought it in a shop I had gone into purely to browse while waiting for a train.

I would like to record that no advertisement was involved. Nobody persuaded me. There was no discount and it was not a bargain in any sense – it was simply a very good coat in a colour I had been looking for without knowing it, in my size, on the one day I had forty minutes to spare.

It was tempting in the pure sense: I wanted it before I had worked out whether I could justify it.

I did try it on, which is the only part of this story where I behaved sensibly. I did not shop around, because I have never once in my life shopped around for anything, and I know this about myself.

The brand was one I had heard of and I told myself that meant something. It does mean something. It does not mean what I thought.

The zip failed in the eleventh week.

Not a dramatic failure – it simply stopped catching at the bottom, so the coat could be done up from the middle only, which in Manchester in January is not a coat. I decided this was my fault somehow, and wore it like that for three weeks.

Then I found the receipt in a book, which is where I keep important paper, and discovered that there was a two-year guarantee, and that the item was therefore not my problem but theirs.

I went to take it back on a Saturday, which was tactically foolish, and stood in a queue for twenty-five minutes rehearsing a speech.

The woman at the desk was called Marian and she took about nine seconds to look at the zip and say, “That is faulty, that is not wear and tear,” and I had my entire speech left over and nowhere to put it.

She offered to exchange it. The same coat in my size was sold out, and had been since November, and would not be coming back because the season had turned over. So she offered a full refund instead, and asked whether I would rather wait for the repair, which would take three weeks and be free.

I took the repair. It came back in nineteen days with a new zip and a small note apologising, and I have worn that coat for nine winters since.

One hundred and eighty pounds, divided by nine years, is twenty pounds a year. My previous coats had cost thirty-five pounds and lasted a season and a half, and I had thought of myself, throughout that entire period, as somebody who was careful with money.

That is the thing nobody explains about value for money: it has almost nothing to do with the price on the day. Cheap things that fail are not cheap. Some expensive things are simply overpriced and some are not, and the only way to tell is time.

I buy almost everything second-hand now, which is a different lesson entirely and mostly Marian’s fault, because she also told me – while writing out the repair docket, entirely unprompted – that the best-made coats in that shop were the ones from fifteen years ago and that people bring them in constantly and they are always, always fine.

As a consumer I am not sophisticated. I do not compare, I do not research, I am exactly the person the industry is designed for. But I know two things now that I did not know at twenty-nine: keep the receipt, and a fault is a fault whatever you have done to it since.