New pants guuuuud. Old pants baaaaad.

I worked at Express for two years in high school, back when it sold generic teenager-y clothes and was not all hard and urban like it is today. Every shift, the manager would brief us on that day's big offer, which we were supposed to spring on each customer within four seconds of their entering the store. It was all very standardized. On any given day, you could go into an Express in Wichita and one in Atlanta and you'd hear the same offer, because it was handed down to us by the Corporate! Headquarters! people.

These were the same people who tracked each employee's selling prowess, via a dazzling array of statistical analyses. Every so often, my manager would sit down with me and tell me that my Average Sale Amount (or whatever) was good, but I needed to up my Average Piece Amount (or whatever). Which meant that I needed to "push more accessories." Every Express salesperson in the country was competing with each other for a RAV-4. Whatever that was.

I never won a "RAV-4," but I was pretty good at the whole shopgirl thing. I escaped the first cut of people who were hired for the holidays but let go soon after, and was allowed to stay on for good. A few months later, I earned a $0.25 per hour raise. Twenty-five freakin cents, people! Anyone who has worked retail knows the blood, sweat, and tears involved. Sadly, at the time I was ecstatic. Ah, the low standards of the average 17-year-old worker.

It's funny how seriously the mall retail industry takes itself. Every season the managers held a staff meeting early on a Saturday morning, when the mall was open but the actual shops were shut. Groups of middle-aged people would be powerwalking down the corridors. I looked forward to the meetings because I'd get to see the University of Maryland girls, who worked the weekday shifts between their classes. I was sort of in awe of them. They would show up with to-go cups from Starbucks and car keys twirling around their fingers, and they were perfectly made-up and wore tight jeans. Same jeans as the ones I had on (you know, the Express bootcut jeans that everybody and their mother wore back in 1996), but the older girls made them look sexy, probably because they wore them two sizes too small. I was desperate to leave for college, so to me they just radiated coolness.

I bought a whole bunch of new pants from Express last night, and it must have made me nostalgic about corporate retail, as evidenced by this twenty-page essay. Good lord.

Being in that store is fun for me now. The clothes have changed, but the important stuff is still the same. There was the girl using the Official Folding Board to fold shirts for the display table, which is a better task than you might think, in that repetition makes the hours go by faster. (This is also why working the cash register is considered such a plum assignment.) There was also the girl banished to the lame, out-of-the-way dressing room area that nobody wants to use because it lacks a three-way mirror, and I felt her pain. Finally, there was the girl learning to use the cash register and getting tripped up by the Line Item Discount and Group Item Discount buttons. Ah, good times.

Anyway, I got some kick-ass pants that I can't wait to wear. One pair is black with pink pinstripes and the other is red corduroy, and soft like BUTTER. I love them so much. Were it legal, I would marry them.

(Heh, is that what all those Republican politicians are worried about, with their "slippery slope of gay marriage" talk? I mean, one of them equated it to people marrying relatives or barnyard animals, but I suppose a girl marrying her trousers is just as godless...)