Friday, November 6, 2009

The Urban Outfitter Complex

I never shop at Urban Outfitters. I take that back, I love shopping at Urban Outfitters. It is right across the street from my office so it's a great place to kill 10 minutes on my lunch break. I never buy anything at Urban (except for gifts and sometimes a stupid coffee table book) But over the years I have noticed that most things I impulse buy somewhere else randomly start showing up on UO shelves. Am I a trend setter for this hipster chain? It is headquartered in Philadelphia.

Here's my UO history:

Bought a Holga senior year of college after seeing my photo major friend Mike take some really awesome pictures. At the time they were available only through lomo.com (sold at UO about a year later)
Bought a pair of Timberland Earthwalkers last winter after seeing them in the King of Prussia mall. An impulse buy but a week later my hiking boots crapped out and it snowed. (sold at UO within the month)
I bought these Tretorn boots at a Tretorn store in Georgetown DC (only other one on east coast in NYC). I wasn't crazy about them but they were on after Christmas sale for half off. I still don't like them but that's mainly because they were sold at UO a week later.
I had been waiting a long time for turntables to go USB though I still haven't had the time to start converting any old records. But when USB turntables came out I swapped the old technics (actually my roommate kept it) for a fancy new cheap piece of crap ion. Sold at UO within the month. Not worth it.I saw these cool retro headphones in a musician's catalogue and bought a pair for my studio. Sold at UO a few months later.

After scouring the internet daily for weird little homemade electronic musical instruments I came across this mass producing version of a stylo phone kit. At $15 on thinkgeek.com how could I resist. This and the make your own music box kit I already had started being sold at Urban the next time I went in.

1 comment:

Despondent Debonair said...

Holy Cow Batman, did you get the post blog bug or what. Nice posts I must say, but I do think you have some sort of ESP UO thing going on. It is always interesting to see what other useless crap... I mean discretionary income spending other people partake in. I guess your keeping that American economy going the patriotic way, buy! Well I salute you, and you seem to be great R & D for UO and the rest of the family at that.