A Real Steal

We have discovered the Secret Vulture Number at work!

 

See, aside from putting clothes back badly hung up in all the wrong places, vulture shopping has another important aspect to it: circling. There is more circling than I would have thought possible. I have had the following conversation more times than I can even remember:

 

VULTURE: (holds up an entire 3-piece suit) How much is this?

AMELIA: Hang on, let me check. (examines price tag; runs it through calculator) With the discount, it comes to one dollar and fifty cents.

VULTURE: (purses lips) Do you think it’ll go any lower?

AMELIA: Lower than a dollar fifty for a three-piece suit?

VULTURE: (shrewdly) I think I’ll wait.

 

Now, inevitably you’re going to find another vulture willing to swoop for a $1.50 suit, and so by the time our prices go down again, most of the nicer stuff is gone, and the shrewd vulture is left with a much uglier, possibly hairy pink suit. But hey—they’re getting it for 75¢! Oh, that clever vulture.

 

This continued on through today, where we are now down to the dregs—the ugly shit nobody would wear in a million years along with a few remaining extra-smalls and extra-larges of nice things. And today, we went from 70% to 75% off.*

 

And the vultures all swooped at once.

 

Apparently, 75% is the Magic Vulture Number. I still had clever business dealers putting 70%-off stuff back on the shelves a couple of days ago to “wait for it to get lower,” but when it gets down to a quarter of the original price, apparently the wait is over. Today people were hauling stacks of ugly crap up to the counter, buying fifteen items, trying on everything in the story, buying two of the exact same item—yes, for themselves, not for like their sister or something—and going nuts in general.

 

It felt like we had stumbled upon an important secret, or at least some psychological phenomenon none of us had ever even realized existed. It was all we could talk about.

 

(Well, almost all. There was that point where the hangers, which have declared open war on me, scored a great victory by ripping the nail off my index finger. God fucking ow damn. And of course there was the decline in professionalism among the staff—the dog, for example, barks all the time now. No sense of decorum, that one.)

 

 

*As versus that day that some stuff was 50% off and then an added 20% off that. I had quite a few people who are not familiar with numbers say, “So it’s 70% off, then?”