How do you buy a sweater?
When I started writing this post, I was halfway through writing what’s basically an introductory article to non-parametric anomaly detection in a data stream. I figure that I should write about more pressing matters, however, and so that’s why I’m writing this post about buying sweaters.
What’s so hard about buying a sweater anyways?
This is a great question. Completely reasonable, and if I was a better man, I’d be able to give you a good answer. Unfortunately, I am the man that I am, and it is late October in New York City, I am cold, and I still don’t have a sweater.
I have been to a number of different stores, I have tried on countless sweaters, I have done my research, and yet I still have not been able to buy one. As I write this, I realize the absurdity of the situation, but push comes to shove (credit card to the machine), I find myself unable to pull the trigger.
The Material
I think that moving out and living on your own teaches you a lot of things. You learn a lot about yourself, and you discover how you behave when you can let your autonomy run wild (within the confines of socially acceptable behaviour).
One thing that I learned was how to wash different textiles. Synthetic fibres are easy to wash but they don’t absorb sweat very well, so they end up smelling pretty bad after you wear them, so you have to wash them often. Fortunately, synthetics can be washed into oblivion and nothing bad will really happen to them. Cotton will absorb your sweat but it’s like a plant, right? So your bacteria will kinda be there, and it’ll grow and become stinky pretty soon. You can wash cotton, you just have to be careful because it’ll shrink on you if you’re really careless about it. You can also stretch cotton out though, so it’s not too bad. Not all cotton garments are made equal, either. You can get some really nice cotton garments that are thick and will keep you very warm, or you can get a cotton t-shirt.
Wool is something that apparently you don’t need to wash often, and when you do, you have to be super gentle with it. Which may sound like it’s more trouble than it’s worth, but I’ve kind of been sold on the idea. Like, you get a wool sweater, and it’s super warm but it won’t make you too sweaty? It sounds great, I’ll be honest. Then you go and ask people about what kind of wool sweater you’re supposed to get, and then some guy on the internet says that Merino wool is actually really not great? Okay, that’s fine. I guess I’ll get a wool sweater that’s not made out of Merino wool?
The Cost
This is a little bit crazy. You can go to Old Navy and get a cotton sweater for like $20, and it probably looks fine. LL Bean makes a wool sweater for like $80. Sure. Taylor Stitch has a fisherman’s wool sweater for $200? What’s the difference between the LL Bean sweater and the Taylor Stitch sweater? Do fishermen buy $200 sweaters? You see those pictures of cool old guys from the 60s wearing big bulky sweaters… Did they buy those for (the equivalent of) $200? I find that very hard to believe. The fisherman in the north of Scotland. Is he wearing a $200 Shetland wool fisherman’s sweater? Look, I’m not saying that it’s impossible, or that they are below owning a $200 Shetland wool fisherman’s sweater. I’m just trying to understand what I’m looking at.
Suppose the answer to the above question is yes. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that indeed $200 is what you need to pay in order to own a Shetland wool fisherman’s sweater, and that $200 is not a rip-off. Okay. Is owning a $200 Shetland wool sweater ten times better than owning that $20 cotton sweater from Old Navy? I’m going to worry so much more about that $200 sweater than I ever will about that $20 sweater, right? I’m paying more money to worry about a sweater? Will owning a $200 sweater make me happier than if I owned a $20 sweater? I’ll have $180 less. How much happiness does $180 buy you? Is it more than the happiness that I will get from owning this very nice sweater?
These are far too many questions for a small fitting room. I should go home and think about it.
The Style
I will preface this by saying that I am not someone who claims to have any authority over anything at all, ever. However, if I’m going to spend \(x \in \lbrack\$20, \$200\rbrack\) on a sweater, I would at least like it to be one that looks fashionable. I suppose I already worried about how it’s going to feel when I (kind of) decided on a material.
What does it mean for a sweater to look good? I don’t know if I’ve ever looked at a sweater and thought to myself “wow that’s a nice sweater.” I know for a fact that I’ve looked at sweaters on my body and thought that they don’t look good, but I’ve never done that for other people. Surely it’s not because other people have figured out how to buy sweaters.
So you go and try on some sweaters, and some of them look good, I guess. Then you send a picture to some trusted sources, and they say “no, not that one,” and you sort of take them at their word. Then you find a sweater that looks fine, and then your trusted source also says that “it looks fine, I guess”, and so you look at it, and it’s like $200, and then you’re thinking whether you should be spending $200 on this thing. So you try to boy math it out, and you say okay this sweater will last me \(N\) years and I’ll probably have to wash it separately, and it looks fine but it’s not great. Then you get to thinking that maybe buying clothes is difficult because you look in the mirror and you don’t really see what you want to see, and think that this sweater would look better if you were a bit more jacked. But that’s neither here nor there, man, you’re here to buy a sweater because you’re cold now. You can worry about getting jacked for next summer, I guess, but right now it’s autumn and you need a sweater now, so you have to make a decision whether this sweater which looks fine, I guess, is the sweater you’re going to drop $200 on.
Well, there’s a store across the street that might have a sale soon, and, all else being equal, if this sweater was a bit cheaper, it’ll be easier to buy. But also is a $150 sweater really that much easier to buy than a $200 sweater? Like it’s already a lot of money to spend on an article of clothing.
In the context of a $20 sweater, the difference between a $150 sweater and a $200 sweater is so tiny, that it doesn’t even feel like it’s worth considering. With the difference between a $150 sweater and a $200 sweater, you could buy two $20 sweaters! Maybe three if there’s a sale!
So is that the solution? Do you buy a $150 sweater and then two (or three) $20 sweaters? Is the marginal satisfaction of two (or three) $20 sweaters greater than the difference in satisfaction between the $200 sweater and the $150 sweater?
Wait, how did we even get here? How is our sweater budget suddenly $200? I just need to buy a sweater.. why do I need to spend $200 on it?
This is why I can’t buy a sweater.