Oh what a life, to be the middleman! There's always someone else to blame, somewhere else to deflect the drama, always some way to wriggle out of responsibility because, at the end of the day, you're just here to facilitate.
That's the enviable position of most online vendors. They sell product to you, the consumer, that's produced by companies with which they generally, special collaborations excluded, have no special relationship. They can guarantee your satisfaction up to a point, but really, they only can and, in theory, have to, do so much. They move what moves and if it's weak shit, then that's on you for wanting it in the first place.
Nowhere is this more evident than when you're shopping for clothes out on the Internet. Due to vagaries of sizing and the impossibility of really discerning color on a webpage, most places offer some form of no strings attached return policy. Sure, there are limits on how long you can keep an item sitting around for, tags must be intact and, sometimes, you have to pay the return shipping. But by and large, if you haven't run around committing mayhem and are in good faith saying that something doesn't work for you, places will take it back.
It gets way more complicated, at least on paper, when you actually do give owning something a go and then everything goes to seed. To wit: Last month, I ordered a fairly expensive sweatshirt made by a reputable manufacturer from a website we all know and love. Things were progressing nicely, the sweatshirt filled out an important need in my wardrobe and fit me like it was tailored specifically to my human form. Then one day, I threw it on and noticed that the whole thing had deflated, stretched and distended itself into a nearly unrecognizable blob of fabric. The sleeve hung down to my fingers. I could fit both hands into the cuffs. The collar had turned into shawl. The hem came down to the bottom of my hips.
I have no idea how this happened unless I stayed up all night in an Ambien trance pulling and tugging at the thing until it very nearly fell apart. That would be a plausible explanation if only I were an Ambien fiend like so many other unfortunate souls that I know. But the sad truth is, the garment just failed. It wasn't made well, or at least not intended to be worn with any regularity. If clothes are as much about function as fashion, it's reasonable to expect something like a sweatshirt to keep its shape for more than a week. If this paragraph seems boring and obvious, it's because the truth often is.
There's loyalty to brands, who we most definitely hold accountable, and then there's loyalty to vendors, which is based for the most part on what they stock and how they choose to present it to us.
Ordinarily, I might have let this pass, taken the loss and hoped for some sort of karmic payback down the road. But this time, I felt a fire stirring deep within my loins. The situation was pretty much set in stone. Since the sweatshirt was no longer "new with tags," there was no way to get my money back. Except, said my loins, why shouldn't I get my money back? If the place has the gall to charge top dollar for the garment, then shouldn't they stand behind their decision to stock it? Implicit in stocking a line is an endorsement of said line. If a retailer can't stand by what it sells, then it's hardly a curated marketplace for high-end, it's just a cynical sieve for foolhardy supply and demand.
It all comes down to trust. We trust these places to sell us shit we want and get it to us safe and sound. But we also look to them for guidance. They are curated with us in mind. We navigate their sites because we trust them to stock quality and offer it up at a competitive price. There's loyalty to brands, who we most definitely hold accountable, and then there's loyalty to vendors, which is based for the most part on what they stock and how they choose to present it to us. These places aren't clearinghouses that reflect what we thought we knew back at us. At their best, they're mentors, big brothers in the eternal struggle that is dressing ourselves.
I didn't say all this in my series of emails with the shop because being long-winded rarely gets results or makes you into a sympathetic case. But after being met with the perfunctory "sorry, no can do," I was give the uniquely odd suggestion that I send the sweatshirt back to them and they would then send it back to the manufacturer, who would determine if it was indeed defective. There was something almost degrading about this. I was being told to bank on a line admitting that what it produced as, at least in this case, of inferior quality. It was almost worse than having no hope at all and I wondered if this customer service person was just fucking with me.
So the emails continued and, by the end, I won. I talked about trust and responsibility and vendor-as-curator. I told them that if I couldn't count on them to sell me shit that wouldn't fall apart, I could scarcely trust them again in the future. I tried to point out that absurdly passing the buck—asking the manufacturer to assume the burden and laugh in my face—was more insulting than a straight up "NO." Either I said something right or scared the right person (thanks, Twitter followers), but finally, they relented. I could send the sweatshirt back for a full refund and even be reimbursed the postage. Justice smiled upon me. I had achieve a minor victory not just for myself, but for us all, I hope.
I haven't sent the sweatshirt back and for all I know, never will. What matters is that I got a vendor to admit that trust matters, that we come back to them because we want to believe that they've got our backs. I can't guarantee that this will work ever again for me, or that you'll get the same results given similar circumstances. I can easily see how this technique could be abused or warped to the point of something far less noble. I do know, however, that my idealism is restored. Lines may be crooked and half-assed, but as long as some shops own up to being the gatekeepers of quality, we can all rest easier in our purchases, instead of taking an L because accountability is a loophole.
Bethlehem Shoals is a writer living in Portland. You can follow him on Twitter here.
