When you’re a 44 waist and rocking a 3XL shirt to be comfortable, there’s not a lot of places you can shop for clothes anymore.

You can find stuff at Old Navy, or Sears… sometimes Fred Meyer. Your choices are pretty limited though.

So, one of the things I’ve been doing since I slimmed down a bit is going into stores I couldn’t shop in before.

And that brings me to Hollister.

Yes, the “shopping here totally makes you a surfer, even if you live in Topeka” store.

They have three stores in Kansas. I looked it up. Carrying on.

I’ve bought a few shirts from Hollister, and I like them. I also like simply being ABLE to shop there, since their target market is the under-20 crowd and I’m, well, not in that demographic and haven’t been in quite some while.

One drawback. “Jake.”

Jake is their signature perfume, and they spray a hell of a lot of it throughout the store.

I’m told they have to spray it every 15 minutes, but that might be an exaggeration.

It might actually be a pleasant perfume if it wasn’t applied in such quantities, but – as it is – we have a policy now where any purchases from Hollister have to come in the front door, have their tags stripped, and go right into the washer while the bag goes out to the trash.  After they’ve been washed once they are evaluated for integration into the general closet population.

This might actually be how they discourage returns. Hadn’t thought of that.

Anyway, I wanted to rant about “Jake”, but I thought to myself thusly:

“Self, you’re not the first person to have this complaint. I bet there’s thousands of people out there who can’t stand the stuff and who have ranted about it before. Most of them are probably better writers. Let’s look them up so we’re not repeating anything.”

What I found instead was:

People raving about Hollister perfume. People selling “retired” scents, and people trying to buy or trade for scents that have gone out of production. People for whom it is their favorite brand and they won’t wear anything else.

In short, example after example of how far out of touch I am with their demographic, which really shouldn’t have come as that much of a surprise but still did.

So my options are to a) feel old or b) complain about how humanity has clearly passed the point where it’s still worth saving, and I’m going with b.