Searching for THE Coat

For the past several years I’ve had a black fitted jacket from H&M. I loved that coat. After gaining weight due to long term unemployment and then working large amounts of it off that coat was the first thing that I put on again.Unfortunately my beautiful coat met an untimely end. In the last few hours I had before leaving my Manhattan apartment for the last time I had to pack and repack my last few belongings over and over again. I only had one bag left and needed to make it all fit. Each repack saw more clothes thrown into the rubbish bin. For the most part these were old tank tops that were stained and miss-fitted anyway. I have a hunch that my wonderful coat ended up in a pile that went out to the garbage. I was in such a hurry that it wasn’t for several days that I even realized that it was missing.

This put me in the UK without a jacket. I find it difficult to replace items that I cherished. In the end I wanted something exactly like my H&M coat. I hunted and hunted and nothing was quite right. The fit was off, the color was off, it wasn’t THE coat.

Then I went to hang out in St. Albans for the day. I checked out the charity shops, this historic streets and then TK Max. In the US it’s called TJ Max and I hadn’t stepped in one for years. None were close to my apartment as I tended to stay in a ten block radius.

Then I found a contender for THE coat position. Problematically it only had a price tag that was half torn off, but it was on the clearance rack. The original retail price was marked as £370, TK Max’s original price was £69.99. I’ve always felt that the retail price is over inflated to make TK Max seem cheaper, but after checking out the Edun webpage I wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t going to pay £69.99, but I would pay £30.00.

I nervously went to the till and asked them to check the price. A few minutes later the phone rang with news, good new, amazing news. The jacket had been marked down to £5. FIVE POUNDS! I couldn’t believe it and bought it as fast as I could so they couldn’t change their minds!

Does anyone else have problems replacing much loved items? How do you take the leap?