: Is the dress you brought at your favourite mall, brand new? It could have been a part of an exchange offer or even on a TV show! Read on to know how retail therapy could boomerang on you
It’s the perfect place to indulge. The soft light bouncing off the textured weave of that classic black suit you’re admiring, the feel-good crunch of the starched shirt beneath your fingers, the approving smile of the store attendant, the scent of new hanging in the air like a trailing G-sharp. For those of you who look upon tottering out of your favourite retail store under the delicious weight of shopping bags as therapy, here’s a shocker: there may be nothing new in them. That’s right. As if it wasn’t enough that clothes came to you after endless trials and much huffing and puffing—your lacy lingerie could have been through the same route too—there’s a good chance they were ‘exchanged’ by another customer who read the fine print: exchange after 15 days from sale is against store policy.
With the apotheosis of the consumer, no shop window dare sport the ultimate turn-off: the all-sales-final sign. There are now several ingenious variations of the returned-with-thanks modus operandi. Buying a birthday present, for instance, almost always entails an ‘exchange’—be it a hardback from one of the fashionable book cafes dotting India’s metros or a block printed tote bag from a street bazaar. Looking a gift horse in the mouth all too often does seem to be the precursor to gift certificates.
Make no mistake, no ums and ahs punctuate such nimble barters. Your mouth hangs open when a college goer confesses to having exchanged a bottle of black nail enamel she had bought just the previous day from a local store—”The lacquer on the frame of my glasses had chipped, it needed a coat of paint,” says Shilpa, a Delhi University student, matter-of-factly—for a more wearable beige, deploring that “it just wouldn’t dry”. Another student (name withheld on request), pursuing a bachelor’s degree in botany from Chennai, says he recently bought a kurta from one of the snazzy textile houses in T Nagar and after flaunting it at a family gathering, exchanged it the next day for collegewear.
Sumathi Doraiswamy, a 60-year-old housewife who has lived in the city’s busy shopping district for over two decades, observes that festival-time sales—the ‘aadi’ month festival is on now—are a boon for the consummate trickster. The milling madness of...
