Jetlag and Shopping

Well, here we are, in America!

The flight over from New Zealand was long, boring, and tiring – just what you would expect. We did have the advantage of flying at night, so that our bodyclocks would let us sleep. Managed a couple of 3-4 hour spells, but it isn’t easy.

Arrived in LA at around 4 in the afternoon local time, having had breakfast on the plane an hour or so before. Headed off to hotel, went for a short walk to suss out the area and kill some time. Of course, we were pretty tired, so around 8 the lights went out and we slept until 1500 next day.

While we were exploring one of the local malls for ‘lunch’, Sharman got chatting to a girl from Guatemala. In the course of conversation, she told us about an “Off-price” store where she goes to buy her clothes. We hadn’t heard that term before. Seems that it is a warehouse type operation where brand name clothes are sold to the trade at a discount. Their prices are 17.5% of retail for women’s clothes, and 22.5% for men’s. We get the feeling that the clothes have probably been on sale at the brand stores, and then the end of line clothes are moved out to the off-price stores to sell to the second-tier shops – including some in New Zealand! This particular store is only open to the public one day a month, and that day was two days away, on Saturday. So we just had to go.

Well, navigating our way through the back streets of East LA with a tourist map, we finally got there, only to find that, in our jet-lagged state, we had the days wrong, and today was only Friday! No wonder that the place was so quiet! But once we explained that we were from NZ (Oh, we have a couple of shops in NZ that come here and buy from us…) they let us in. Let us try and paint a picture. Imagine a large industrial warehouse building, concrete floor, no ceiling, as little lighting as possible. There are rows and rows of clothing racks, each rack about 10 metres long, packed with clothes. Across the room were 5 or 6 racks, down the length, the rows were spaced wide enough apart to take a supermarket trolley. David counted 45 rows in the first building. Then there were big sliding doors on one side to a second building. But that one was much smaller, only about half the size of the main one. Men’s clothes and overflow women’s. That led into another building about half the size again, for children’s clothes.

Only one thing to say: Wow!

Because they cater to the clothing trade, there are no fitting rooms – after all, their customers are shop buyers, who may be buying several items of different styles, each in a range of sizes. We definitely felt a little out of place, only choosing one of a line. It would be so easy to go mad in a place like this, but we managed to contain ourselves to just what we needed..

Note for Kasana and Graham: you might want to plan some time in your trip to visit this place when you come over.

Next, we are off to Palm Springs and further east.