Why I Buy My Shirts at the Goodwill

I don’t buy new shirts. Price might have something to do with it. I don’t know. The last time I looked at the price of a new shirt was probably 20 or 30 years ago and I didn’t like what I saw then. These days I buy my shirts at the Goodwill store—not just because they’re cheap but also because they have a better selection.

If you’re looking for a cheap shirt in a department store—and I’m only talking relatively cheap—you’re probably looking at a T-shirt rack. But beware. T-shirts don’t come in the sizes that they used to.

Now they come in sizes X, 2X, 3X and Googol-X.  The X size is equivalent to what used to be 40-Long.  The 3X-size is equivalent to what used to be a nightshirt in colonial days and the Googol-X could double as a parachute.

I don’t normally tuck in my T-shirts but in the old days, if I wanted to do so it could be easily done.  It was a way to change a work shirt into a casual shirt the way a secretary might unbutton a blouse slightly if stopping by a bar on the way home from the office.   And if you didn’t tuck it in, it never hung more than three or four inches below the belt. Either way was a very neat look.

Today’s X-Line of T-shirts goes down to somewhere right around my knees.  It’s nearly as impossible to tuck that much material into your pants as it was to squeeze a 4-man Boy Scout tent into those tiny bags they came in.  Of course, you could get the tent into the bag eventually but it required two guys working very hard to roll it very tight and a couple of sticks from around the camp fire to shoehorn them into the bag.
 
Tucking today’s T-shirts into my pants is out of the question.  The bulk of material stuck inside my pants and the amount of furls left over and hanging below my belt could easily qualify me for the Ringling Brother’s Circus Clown line.

Looking neat in today’s oversized T-shirts is out of the question for me. I’m lucky if I don’t look like I’m wearing a 4-man Boy Scout tent.

Another thing about T-shirts in the good old days was the color. They were white. When it comes to T-shirts, you can’t go wrong with white. But no one wears plain white T-shirts anymore.

Now you have to have a team logo or a player’s number on your shirt. I never had a T-shirt (or for that matter, a jacket or sweatshirt) with a team logo or player’s number on it—unless it was a team I played on, which wasn’t even possible because they don’t put numbers on bowling shirts.

Shirts with logos on them are for the people that play or work for those teams.  I wouldn’t wear a shirt with a logo anymore than I would wear a milkman’s shirt or a mailman’s shirt.

It used to be that T-shirts had only one purpose, which was to cover up that area of your body between the top of your pants and the bottom of your neck.  That’s pretty much all anyone wanted and that’s pretty much all they got.

And isn’t that the perfect description of the good old days if ever there was one?

Today, T-shirts serve three purposes.  They let everyone know what your favorite team is and who your favorite player is.  They make the already rich athlete richer and their super-rich team even richer.  And, finally, they teach kids that money is just something you throw away on crap—crap with a logo—but crap nonetheless.

When I was a boy, if you wanted to know who made a particular shirt you would look at the tag inside the shirt.  Today, they put the label on the outside of the shirt.  A good example of this is the Nike Swoosh.  It seems as if the swoosh is everywhere. 

In fact, I’m kind of wondering why there isn’t a swoosh on the keyboard so I could just hit that key rather than have to spell out swoosh.  I imagine that will happen one of these days—probably when Nike and Microsoft merge to form a word-processing-sports-apparel company that you can access from an apt on any cell phone.

Putting a label on the outside of a shirt seems a little snooty to me.  It’s all right on a car because a lot of work goes into designing and manufacturing a car.

But a shirt?  I don’t know.  It’s got a little hole at the top and a big hole at the bottom and two armholes on the sides.  It’s just a shirt.  Not exactly bragging’ right material.  Yet we become walking billboards for these companies and, get this, we pay them.  In fact we pay them more for the shirt with their advertisement on it than we would if it was just a plain white T-shirt with nothing on it.

It’s no wonder I don’t buy shirts from Department stores.

I’d rather walk into a Goodwill store and actually buy what used to be called a casual shirt at a price that is cheaper than a plain white T-shirt used to be and in a size I can recognize—and if I go on a Wednesday I can get half-off of that already cheap price.

I don’t know how they do it but it might be the only thing that will allow me to look back someday at these days and call them the good old days.  I just hope that Goodwill doesn’t come up with some fancy slogan to put on the shirts like “Goodwill—Not Just Good but Great” and ruin a good thing.