I don’t even know what’s in here

Recently, the onset of Hong Kong’s version of winter presented us with another chance to savor the intersection of the city’s near-total lack of residential climate control and its hilariously dysfunctional retail culture.

Weather forecasts are calling for lows in the mid-to-low 50s℉ (10-13 or so ℃) in Hong Kong within the next ten days and trying to heat an uninsulated apartment with single-pane glass windows to shirtsleeves-level-comfortability using space heaters is a sucker’s game. Consequently, I was in the market for a couple of crew-neck, button-down cardigans which I’ll be able to don and doff as necessary when indoor ambient temperatures seesaw erratically during the next month or two. Regular sweaters are great, but there’s nothing for it but to take them off (by pulling them over your head) if you feel uncomfortably warm.

So… cardigans, with buttons. Like Mr. Fred Rogers? Nope. As far as I can tell, his cardigans were all zip-ups (and might fall under the heading of knit zip-up jumper instead of cardigan) and I really can’t abide zippers on shirts. It’s a quirk of mine. Surprisingly, most readily-available men’s cardigans either have deep v-necks or are shawl cardigans with frilled necks that make them look like something an actress in an episode of Columbo (from the original 1968-1978 NBC run) might have worn.

I’m not a teenager or a big A&F customer, but Abercrombie & Fitch’s dark brown FUZZY WOOL-BLEND CARDIGAN looked OK. It was a solid color, had no logos printed/stapled/sewn/glued onto it, and met my three criteria: is cardigan, is button-up, has crew neck. And purchasing would be straightforward. I could buy from the A&F web site. Which was out of stock in my size.

Cognizant of the possibility that the brand’s web site and it’s brick-and-mortar store might not share or sync inventory, S. and I phoned the shop. Actually, I’ve omitted a step. Attempting to phone the store number provided on abercrombie.com.hk was futile, since it dumped calls into a voicemail inbox with a prerecorded message that seemed unrelated to A&F. Fortunately, I persevered in Googling and found Yelp‘s listing for the shop, which included a working number. Iris, a store manager, picked up. She informed us that there were gray and brown versions of the cardigan and agreed to hold one of each in my size at the checkout. Moreover, some sort of sale was currently on or there was going to be a sale and those sweaters would be 30% off if I bought them the next day.

S. and I trundled off to the store the following afternoon and stepped off of the pavement and across the store’s threshold, out of the sunlight and into the perpetually twilit realm of a The Lost Boys‘ lair — if 1980s Californian vampires ran chain stores selling casual luxury clothing to bed-head-sporting youths. The Yelp page includes some photos taken inside of the store (similar to the three which I took and which I’ve incorporated into this post). We’d actually visited the shop shortly after it opened and I recalled the lighting being terrible at that time but took it for granted that the lighting situation had to have been remedied in the intervening years and assumed the Yelp pics had been taken way back when.

Wrong. It was dark. Dark enough that I wished I’d brought a miner’s headlamp or a cobweb-strewn candelabra to help us find our way around. Something I hadn’t recalled from our one and only other visit: the shop’s carpeted stairs consist of par-for-the-course-in-HK, midgety little steps. Ascending to and descending from different floors meant having the rear third of whichever of my feet was on a step hanging in the air, in semi-darkness.

We got the sweaters and I tried them on briefly. The lighting in the changing rooms opposite the cash registers, was slightly better than in the rest of the store, but still extremely dim and very yellow. Was one of the sweaters a dark brown? Was the other one really gray? It was well-nigh impossible to tell for sure, but I banked on the photos of the brown version on the A&F web site being accurate and decided to buy both. We explored the shop a bit before paying and leaving. It was quite a bit like wandering through an amusement park’s haunted house. Is that shadow in the corner another customer? A mannequin? A sales associate? There were spotlights angled to hit some display items but those lights, like the ones in the changing room, were very yellow and dim, so it was impossible to get an accurate idea of the way anything on sale in the store actually would look under normal conditions.

Moments after we’d paid and begun shuffling towards the stairs that led back up to the ground floor and the exit, while trying not to trip over anything or bump into anyone in the darkness, a cash register attendant (but not the one who had rung up my sweaters) called out to me and ran over to hand me my credit card, which I’d forgotten. Except I hadn’t paid with a card. I’d used cash. Yes, the interior of the store is so dimly lit that the staff can’t distinguish one customer’s face from another’s.

Walking back out onto Pedder Street felt like returning to the Earth’s surface after a spelunking expedition deep into some sunless cave system. We’d only taken a few steps towards IFC when S. looked at the shopping bag in my hand and, noticing the message (I don’t even know what’s in here) printed on the narrow sides perpendicular to the handles, laughed aloud.

In Why Abercrombie & Fitch Is Pulling Out of Hong Kong, the author connects the upcoming closure of Hong Kong’s only A&F outlet, the place I’ve just described, with a decline in Mainland Chinese shopper-tourism. That probably accounts for part of the shortfall in anticipated sales, but A&F set themselves up for failure by making it unreasonably difficult for prospective buyers to see their merchandise.

Hence my variation on the tried and true Matrix Morpheus image macro (What if I Told You) at the top of this post.