rubberslug loot

The last time I was in A&F everyone looked and dressed like Hemmingway and there wasn't a tee-shirt in sight.

That could be regional thing. Out here in LA since its warm most of the time they always carry shirts. Last month I was heading up to Seattle so I went to A&F in LA to buy a jacket for cold weather but there wasn't even a jean jacket in the whole store. By the way the Hemmingway line is really funny:)

I wrote up a multipage summary of retail marketing, but then I realized how incredibly dry it was. So I erased it.

Basically, many things that everyone believes are customized, high-tech, high-quality, or cool is merely a product of a very refined marketing machines. People spend lifetimes thinking of how to make cheap things look and feel expensive.

Marketing is an insanely powerful thing. I know how dirty it is and I'm still influenced.

As a chemist in a past life, if I had to guess how to make things seem softer, I'd guess it's a chemical bath in a toxic level of fabric softener that isn't safe to sell at the supermarket with some sort of neutralizing agent to strip out anything (known) carcinogenic or suggestive of a lawsuit. Call it prewashed. Just don't mention water. And since we're in Mexico with historically lax environmental protection laws, let's just dump the chemical bath out into the river and let hazmat in the next state worry about the snuggly-soft three-eyed fish.

That would be unethical, you say?

Well, think of something to slap on a shirt that disparages some random minority group, front-load your catalouges with kiddie porn, and call it a day.

Because that's how Abercrombie makes their bank, right?

In my youth I worked for a few t-shirt shops and the way they make the cloth soft is to put the whole bolt of cloth in a drum about the size of a VW van and add a few hundred pounds of round stones or steel balls and roll it for half a day.
This beats the cloth until it's soft,This is sometimes called stone washed I'm sure most of you have heard of this type of cloth.
After the wash they are put it in a dryer and and this makes all the beat ends of the cloth stand up and makes the cloth feel soft to the touch.
It's a very low tec way of making the cloth soft.
Chemicals cost to much to make any money using them so most of the time they use this low tec way of doing it but not always.
After the wash the cloth is cut and sewed together with unwashed new thread to make the shirt look new but the cloth is about worn out before it ever get's worn by you.
The thread count per inch is what makes the shirt last longer the higher the count the softer and the longer it will last just like the sheets on your bed the higher the count the softer the sheet this higher count also is why good sheets cost more they use more thread in them.
Hanes heavy weight and A&F have the same thread count but one beats there cloth and the other does not this is the only difference between the two.
I hope this helps out some?
Roy

[quote]By the way the Hemmingway line is really funny:)[/quote]

I was only half joking. Years ago A&F used to be the outfitters for your next safari or big game hunt so literally Hemmingway was their posterboy. I guess I was saying that I haven't set foot in A&F for many, many, [b]many[/b] years.