Friday, December 18, 2009

UnAmerican Eagle

While shopping at the mall last night I stopped by one of my favorite stores, American Eagle. Apparently, in my excitement to finish Christmas shopping I forgot to take off my button, this one:

Or maybe it was because I was wearing this:

The following is the actual sequence of events that occurred while I was looking at men's hoodies in my favorite store where I'm a bit of a regular:
Cast of Characters
AE Employee: young, metrosexual punk kid was apparently in charge of manning the men's department
Prairie Princess: wearing an orange jumpsuit and suspected terrorist button doing my Christmas shopping.
I grabbed a hoodie off of a rack and began laying it out on a table to take a picture of it w/ my phone, to send to my friend for her opinion. AE Punk looked looked over at me, I politely smiled and cheerfully said, "Hi! Just gonna take a picture to send to my friend for shopping advice."
AE Punk (very condescendingly AND loudly w/ a total evil smile): "UH MA'AM YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO TAKE PICTURES ANYWHERE IN THE STORE."
PPP (Prisoner Prairie Princess) still smiling: "Ha ha, oh it's just to send to my friend to figure out whether I should buy it or not. I'm not going to attempt to sew my own copy cat AE hoodie at home."
AE Punk: "I SAID YOU CANNOT TAKE PICTURES IN HERE."
PPP (not really smiling anymore): "OH UH UH. Why don't you just turn around and pretend you don't see when I take this HARMLESS picture of a hoodie."
He didn't appreciate my humor or honor my request and looked like he was going to whip out his price gun and stun me with it so I put my phone away. Meanwhile, I sang a line or two of "Jesus, Take the Wheel" in my head, and reminded myself it WAS the holidays, AND I should have a little "holiday in my heart", AND that AE Punk had probably had a rough day, so I left it alone.
UNTIL......a few minutes later I was looking at a different rack of hoodies, some of which were marked down and some that were not. They were all the same style so I asked AE Punk (who was watching me LIKE A HAWK and following me everywhere), whether or not they were on sale.
And again out came the attitude. Here's an excerpt of that conversation:
PPP: "So are these on sale?"
AE Punk (after muttering under his breath and I swear I heard him say DUH) again very condescending: "Every top in the store is buy one get one half off."
PPP: "Yes I realize that (duh there's a sign every 6 inches), but these are marked down and these are not even though they are exactly the same. So are these all the same price?"
AE Punk (not even coming closer to look at what I was talking about) attitude OOZING,: "Well then I would say they aren't on sale."
PPP: "WOW. And I would say I AM DONE SHOPPING HERE RIGHT NOW," and semi-stormed out of the store.
Seriously. Merry stinkin' Christmas people. :)

3 comments:

  1. And that's why all of my Christmas shopping is done online. Yucky!

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  2. I LOVE that store(when I am not pregnant)-was it the JCM one? If so, they do have snobby people working there!
    PS-LOVED your Christmas Zoo letter-funny & you have great writing skills!!

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  3. I enjoyed your tortured shopping trip very much. I bet you're just fetching in your orange jumpsuit!

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