I’m old enough to remember when
the Gap was a store that sold only Levi’s. That was in 1969, when the store was
founded and their slogan was “fall into the Gap.” That means I’ve been a Gap
customer for almost 50 years. But lately I’ve been finding that, while their
prices, have been going up, the quality has been going down, to the point where
they may lose a life-long customer.
Now, this would be no great
tragedy were it not for the fact that this phenomenon mirrors what’s happening
in the economy in general, namely the disappearance of the middle class. While
the middle class is disappearing from cities like New York and people are
increasingly either very wealthy or very poor, in the retail landscape this is
mirrored by the fact that people are increasingly shopping at either Kmart or
Bergdorf Goodman.
I have always relied on the Gap
for “dress casual” clothes at “dress casual” prices. After all, I work in publishing, not finance. But lately it seems like they’ve abandoned that market altogether.
Like today, for example, I went to
buy some polo shirts. No biggie, right? I went to three different branches of
the Gap: Astor Place, lower Fifth Avenue and Chelsea. Astor Place had almost no
selection whatsoever, lower Fifth Avenue was under construction with, again,
almost no selection whatsoever and Chelsea only had a small selection in odd
sizes and ugly colors. I bought the only three “smalls” I could find. I asked
the cashier why there was such a poor selection and she told me that all the
normal sizes and colors had sold out. “When am I supposed to buy polo shirts?”
I asked her. “Winter?”
Just out of curiosity, I decided
to walk down to the Banana Republic in Chelsea. There I found an almost
completely empty store (their customers were undoubtedly in the Hamptons or
Fire Island for the weekend) with stacks of merchandise. The only catch is that
their polo shirts were twice as expensive as the Gap’s and almost too nice to
wear to the office.
Inevitably, in these situations,
my ire falls upon the hapless sales clerks, who have one of the worst jobs in
our bad economy. I asked one of the sales clerks in the Chelsea store if there
was a corporate strategy to phase out the Gap entirely. I pointed out to him
that I have been a life-long customer of the Gap and that while their prices
have gone up, the quality has gone way down, to the point where I almost can’t
find anything I would even consider
buying. The only reason I still shop there, I told him, was because I don’t want
to deal with the crowds at Macy’s. (And I must really hate crowds when you consider that it now costs $60
for a dress shirt at the Gap compared to $30 for a better quality shirt at
Macy’s. And even after I buy that $60 shirt at the Gap, I still have to take it
to a tailor because it’s missing a second button on the cuff, making the
sleeves too long and too wide unless I wear one of those large chunky watches
on each wrist.)
What I did not mention to him was that this is how companies in
general do business these days. They take a product that costs pennies to make
and then charge a fortune for it, with most of that money going to the
corporate executives at the top as opposed to the people who make and sell that
product. I didn’t mention how most of that money is spent on advertising to create
a well-known international brand as opposed to creating a better product. And I
didn’t mention the sweatshops where these products are made so that people like
me could still afford to buy them while the corporate bigwigs raked in the
insane mark-up.
After I unleashed my tirade on
this poor sales clerk, I apologized to him for doing so and went home with my
three polo shirts from the Gap, wondering if that would be the last time I ever
shopped there. Because, nowadays, when you “fall into the Gap,” you fall into
the crap.
