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If you read the Plane — and let’s be clear, you do — you live an interesting life, and you live it philosophically. You probe the nuances… challenge the conventional wisdom … seek a deeper partnership with the eternal verities. That’s just what it means to be part of the most beautiful readership across all media.
So it’s no surprise that, when we receive reader questions, they tend toward the provocative and profound. We have a recurring series called “Personal Spyplane” where we answer these questions — and today it’s time to get Personal.
How do you wear clothes that hold tough/ unchill memories? (i.e. you got bad news while wearing them)
We usually think about the opposite scenario, where a garment becomes imbued with a happy memory or the pleasant afterglow of some other positive Life Event.
But what if a cool beautiful hottie you’ve been dating dumps you while you’re wearing a prized slapper? What if — heaven forfend — you get news about a serious misfortune befalling a loved one while you’re dripped down? And so on.
There’s not really gonna be any one universal answer. But where my mind goes is that, if it feels difficult to wear a garment because something very bummerish happened while you were wearing it, and now the residue of that bummer seems to have coated the threads, you should honor that feeling.
This could take several forms. Maybe you sell the garment or give it away, expelling the cursed talisman and, hopefully, the cursed feelings along with it. Maybe you fold it up carefully and place it in a drawer without any intention of ever wearing it again, in a gesture of memorialization. Maybe you do pull it on, periodically, to see where you’re at vis a vis the tough memory. Maybe you force yourself to rock it, on some exposure therapy s--t, and so you can make newer, happier memories in it.
It’s not for me to say which if any of the above will make sense. But the slapper will let you know.
How should I treat returns / complaints at small banging shops vs. big corporations?
As far as returns: This is an area where all shops really hemorrhage money. Big companies are equipped, in depressing ways, to “manage” these losses. They might set fire to returned inventory, send it straight to the landfill, or contract with some third-party “Returns Liquidation” business whose existence speaks to our dumb, bloated, and twisted economy.
At a small store, with tighter margins, returns have a much gnarlier and more ruinous effect. You might think you’re simply hitting undo, with a “net zero” outcome, but you are in fact contributing to a non-negligible dent in the shop’s bottom line. This is a huge reason why some places like, say, Brooklyn’s Ven.Space, avoid e-comm entirely.
In both cases, returns are intensely wasteful and bad for Gaia, especially if you’ve been conditioned to think it’s normal to order 10 things and return 8 of them. Also, a ton of returning and reselling turns you into the manager of your own little inane logistics hub, when you could be doing much more satisfying things with your time. At this point Erin and I basically never buy anything we’re unsure about online, aside from the occasional secondhand eBay gamble. E-comm is, despite all appearances, not the place for wild experiments and copping on whims. If I’m uncertain about how something will look or fit, and I can’t get that information by asking the shop or doing a little research, I err on the side of not copping until I can try it on in person or find another way to cop with certainty. This means I tend not to return the things I do buy. I can’t remember the last time I did.
It’s worth aspiring to membership in a club you could call the blessed “N.R.A.” — Never Return Anything — even if there might be rare instances when you simply gotta transgress.
As far as complaints: At a huge corporation, the person they underpay to field your call is obviously not your real enemy. For their sake & yours, talk to them with kindness, or at least patience — even if they’re skilled at their real job, which is to frustrate you so intensely that you’d rather end the call than spend one more minute trying to remedy whatever wack s--t the company did. (This obviously gets harder the more important the “product,” i.e., a company sending you the wrong-color duvet cover is orders of magnitude different from a health insurer denying you coverage.)
At a small shop, if you’ve got a complaint, you should obviously be chill and cut them some slack, because small operations are prone to make mistakes, move a little slower, etc. I’ll actually go one further and say that in any “customer service” interaction, remember that people are not chatbots, they are not NPCs, you are not a little king, they are not your subjects.
This doubtless strikes every Cool Person in Spy Nation as obvious. But these days, as phones continue to degrade human interaction in all kinds of ways, people seem increasingly prone to demand things of other people online with the same grunting bluntness they use when they’re typing into a Google search field…
Imagine approaching a person and saying: “temperature average NYC November.” And imagine if, after they told you the weather despite the insane way you asked for it, you just turned around and walked away without any reply.
Psycho s--t, but this kind of thing actually happens. I know firsthand. Never in the comments here, to be clear, because Spy Nation is way too big-brained and big-hearted. But you wouldn’t believe how many randos hit the IG comments or DMs out of nowhere to be, like, “Got a wedding this summer and it’s gonna be hot, need suit recs.” Or just like, “what are some cool duffel bags.”
Presumably these weirdos get answers talking to other people like that. But not us, brotherman 🙅♀️!
I thought about this the other day when Spyfriend Eric Oglander posted the below message to his stories.
Eric owns the fantastic antique-curio shop Tihngs, a very special place in Queens, NY, that I wrote about visiting here. It’s a tiny operation worthy of not just respect but admiration.
Seems people have been moving goofy in Eric’s DMs to the degree he needs to remind them, “You’re interacting with a human even though I look like an Instagram page.”
It’s wild that he has to say this. But phones, along with a general assault on the social compact, are driving some poor souls among us toward true freak behavior.
I get it. Even the best of us can feel powerless to effect any change upon the world except through displays of our “consumer power.” But that is, of course, a deeply cucked, false kind of power. Fight the freak wave. Practice kindness and consideration. Saintliness is next to saucefulness. Put your anger and your energy where it actually matters.
And finally —
Alternatives to the swaggy but torched Salomon XT-6?
The coolness trajectory of the XT-6 over the past ~5 years is truly fascinating.
The shoe lived for years as a totally fashion-agnostic, performance-focused “middle-aged French Tourist” staple. Around 2020 it found a place on the bleeding edge of gorpy swag. And now it has become thoroughly mass and “basic” …
The funny thing is, XT-6s remain undeniable bangers. And yet, as I explored in this past Thursday’s Plane, context is always constitutive of something’s appeal, and so they’re currently sitting in the liminal realm we call the Unswaggy Valley.
Here’s an intel-rich Classified Tier Slapper Swarm dedicated to 8 fire Salomon XT-6 alternatives that live further below the radar: