Much like the transitions in a werewolf movie, my eyebrows grew bushy and white, the skin on my face and neck sagged a bit more, I put on a few pounds, and my voice cracked in a nasally/whiny way: “Did you ever wonder why we’re constantly paying more for less? There’s an old saying, ‘you get what you pay for,’ but lately, I’m not even sure we get that.” All it took was trying on the new t-shirts I had ordered to change me in to Andy Rooney for the day. Suddenly I was shaking my fist at everything, Amazon, Hanes, the resealable bag that the shirts came in…
My daily uniform is blue jeans and t-shirt. Sometimes the shirt is colored (but plain) and every once in a while it’s got a humorous (to me) print on it: cookie monster hungover and surrounded by empty shot-glasses of milk; a happy cactus with arms outstretched and the word hugz?; three wolves howling at moon like what you’d see painted on a late 70s conversion van. But my main uniform is a plain white t and jeans. I had a girlfriend who would sometimes affectionately reference the Lana Del Rey song when she saw me. “Blue jeans, white shirt / walked into the room, you know yo made my eyes burn.”
I’m too lazy, cheap, and inept to have any real fashion sense. I like to keep things simple. As such, I wear through my plain white tees every year or so (the jeans I’ll wear until they have holes in places that make them indecent). The shirts get grimy. They get ring around the collar. I spill stuff on them. And after a while, they just wear thin and begin to yellow in the wash. The last pack I bought got extra heavy use on the road-trip. I hiked and camped and slept in them.
I order the same item from Amazon every time I get new shirts. I know it’s the same item because I go into my order history and click order again. Hanes cotton moisture wicking tagless crew neck. Last week, I ordered another pack… and because I was feeling adventurous, I took a chance and got a pack of v-neck shirts too… you know “new year, new me” and “California chill” type of shit. I buy a size large which tends to be form-fitting when I’m in shape and feel a little more like sausage casing when I’m not in shape.
The shirts arrived yesterday. I opened the amazon bags, and then tore into the resealable bag of v-necks. As I did so, I thought of the Toothpaste for Dinner comic – seriously, why do they come in a resealable bag? Then when I realized I’d be returning them, I saw the wisdom in the resealing part that I had rendered useless. Ah that’s why. The v-necks despite being a size large (like my other shirts) felt more like a house dress with a plunging neckline. I had expected the v to terminate just below the collarbone and instead, it went all the way down to just below my sternum. Had I been wearing a manzier, it and the sides of my manboobs (moobs) would have been showing. I was hoping for sexy, but not quite like that. When I tried on the crew neck shirts, they too seemed to run bigger than usual and were thinner than they used to be – almost to the point of being see-through. When I go out on the town in my uniform, I’d like to leave a little something to the imagination. I grabbed one of my old shirts for comparison – same brand, same style, but my year-old, grimy and worn-out shirts seemed thicker than these new shirts.
My first thought was that this was some diabolical plot by big cotton and fast fashion to cheapen their products while charging the same amount – like putting more air in the potato chip bag or shrinking the size of the cereal box. I began to imagine some guy twirling his snidely whiplash mustache and cackling as he turns the cartoonishly big dial from the “thin” setting on the right side of the factory’s t-shirt making machine past the “thinner,” “super thin,” and “super duper thin” settings all the way to left where there’s a red light flashing above the setting for “the thinnest we’re legally allowed to use and still call it a shirt.” Of course, I have no idea what a t-shirt factory looks like or how one functions, but I’m assuming somewhere an actuary wearing a green visor calculated that Hanes could save over $8 million by using thinner fabric. After blaming “the man” for producing a lower-quality product in their relentless search for profits, I had to allow that maybe some new environmental regulation or initiative went into effect since the last time I purchased these shirts. Maybe they’re more sustainable? Maybe they’re more ethically sourced? (I doubt it).
Having mentally run through a few scenarios on why my shirts are not the same as the ones I bought last year, I returned to the notion of enshittification (a term I discovered and mentioned in my Valentine’s Day post). While the term is specific to the internet (“a pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that function as two-sided markets”), I’m finding that I want to apply it to everything that no longer functions the way it should either because markets have driven the quality down and the prices up or because companies have stopped supporting their traditional products in favor of newer and shinier things. We live in an increasingly disposable society and the things we buy seem to be getting shittier and more expensive every day.
From there, my mind makes all kinds of logical missteps and leaps that lead me to conclude that society is being pulled apart at the seams – and not just because those seams are cheaply made. This week Macy’s announced they’d be closing 150 stores, a handful of billionaires sold massive amounts of stock, and long-standing stalwarts in one of our country’s two major political parties have decided to step back from leadership roles. It feels a lot like a reckoning is coming and those who can afford to cash out and hide away in their private bunkers are getting ready to do so…
All because the t-shirts that have been a staple of my wardrobe for years aren’t as good as they used to be.