Mirror of a Non-Shopper

Weaving in and out of line

“the sidewalk’s full of merchandise”
- “Lion in a Coma”, Animal Collective

Today Sara and I fulfilled our plan to go shopping in an ukay-ukay. We went to the one Noelle wrote about, the one right next to the Anonas LRT-2 station.

Confession: When we got off the jeep and I saw the sign saying “Lolo Oboy’s”, I felt giddy and excited and scared. Let’s face it: thrift stores kind of scare me. SO MANY HANGERS. @_@ I attempt to go in them, but I’m usually unsuccessful in finding treasures, unlike other people I know. I didn’t want to screw the whole op and leave an ukay heaven empty-handed. (Like what I did in Baguio, for example.)

But still, I marched forward. After all, I wasn’t charging on by myself.

So. Like Noelle said, the place was four floors of thrift shops. Sara and I checked out the first shop there, and, after painstakingly browsing through the racks, I saw this gem. But it was too small for me. Drat.

After several more minutes of browsing–and, to be honest, I was starting to feel my energy draining from me already–I delightfully found two tops I could buy. They were the kind I needed, and they actually fit me well! Sadly, though, the price was much higher than I expected. But I got them anyway.

Lesson learned: thrift stores near the entrance of the mall/ukay center are more expensive. Therefore, go deeper. Or, in this case, go higher. Sara and I went straight to the top floor. And, behold! There were racks that had clothes for P50 each, and even P10 each. There were LOTS of cute skirts, but I didn’t get any because, like most people know, I don’t do skirts. But if you love skirts, you’ll probably enjoy looking through those racks.

We looked into several more shops, and I surprisingly bought a couple more tops. Yey! But as happy as I was that I was being productive, I was feeling my shopper stamina reaching a critically low level. If I was a game character, the health bar would probably be in red.

One observation about Lolo Oboy’s: as cheap as the items were, you cannot get discounts from the tag prices. I mean, you can’t haggle with the salesladies. Being used to tiangges, this is pretty much a new thing to me. And there were also rather expensive items (for ukay standards, anyway).

In the last shop we went into, I very nearly got this Zara bolero that was priced P380. It was rather thin and creased, but it was Zara. It looked reaaaally nice on me, and since boleros don’t usually work with me, this was a rare find. But I said I was only going to get items lower than 200. I already had to break that for a rare, rare shirt (I’ll blog about it later and show you why), so I decided that I would just have to hunt for a cheaper, unbranded bolero.

So, in summary, I did not leave Lolo Oboy’s empty-handed, and the expedition to Anonas was rather productive. It drained me a bit, though, and made me realize that maybe I’m still not quite ready for mega ukay experiences yet.

Gah. I have a loooooooooong way to go to being a real shopper. *sigh* Someday, maybe. Or maybe not. We’ll see.

history, stores

Tags: ukay

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