It’s the sort of mistake any young store clerk could make. But it’s also the sort of mistake that could get a person fired from the retail industry—working alone in the women’s undergarment department, she had mistakenly left the drawer open.
It’s not that this sort of carelessness has never happened before, but this singular event may have launched an unexpected revolt in the undergarment industry. Indeed, the so-called Spring Revolutions recently blazing around the world may have finally come home to roost on our own favorite retail clothing store shelves.
There’s more to say about our beleaguered sales girl in a few moments…
Some say that the fabled Boxer Shorts Rebellion started it all. Protesting poor shelving conditions in a particularly dilapidated K-Mart store, men’s underwear had gone berserk—not the employees, but the underwear itself. After careful planning, sometime during the darkened nighttime hours, as the security guard inspected plumbing supplies at the far end of the store, Men’s Shorts gathered their combined strength into a unified effort and slid quietly from their wrappers, swapping packaging with one another. During the mass rebellion, 30” waist size briefs exchanged packaging with 44” size boxer shorts. Fashionable, Speedo-like apparel in bold purple and green patterns ended up disguised in the wrappings of special-purpose easy-on disposable, moisture-resistant medical undergarments.
The payoff came the day after the purchase of the underwear, when irritated customers of all dimensions and proportions angrily returned their mislabeled goods. One beanpole-shaped fellow complained that his brand new shorts were so large that they disappeared down his pant legs. Another red-faced customer of enormous potbellied proportions threatened to sue if the feeling didn’t soon return to his mid-region, claiming that he was nearly strangulated by a pair of microscopic sport briefs masquerading in a box colorfully labeled “Fashionable Styles for Portly Gentlemen.”
The rebellion was so overwhelmingly successful and held such enduring impact that the men’s undergarment department had been shut down and disbanded. Atop the empty shelves were forbidding warning signs, declaring “Shop at Your Own Risk!” These signs had been scrawled over with newer disclaimers: “Due to English Language Problems with Suppliers in Thailand, Product Contents Can No Longer Be Guaranteed.”
The ensuing copy-cat episodes in other men’s undershorts departments in neighboring stores strangled reliable supplies and raised the local men’s undershorts costs. For three months running, men’s undergarment sales became Internet giant Amazon’s most profitable revenue source.
Some say it’s the elastic in the undergarments that made possible the nimble maneuvers in and out of boxes so rampant among men’s undershorts. If true, the theory yields credence to the very newest contagion of the spreading dilemma: women’s undergarments. Similarly elastic, the potential revolution among women’s departments could be even more calamitous. Untold yards of angry stretching and snapping elastic, with sinister purposes, could pose a far greater threat to the security of the nation’s undergarment supply.
And so we return again to our hapless women’s undergarment clerk who left the drawer open, and whom I happened to photograph at the very moment of the dawn of this new feminine undies insurrection. Panic stricken, one can see the young woman, clad in black, grabbing for the massively escaping avalanche of unmentionables, making their getaway from the unlocked drawer towards the freedom just beyond the store’s doorway.
Standing just beyond the door, I panicked at their sinister approach toward me, straps wildly flailing like tentacles. I bolted down the street out of cowardice and fear of the deranged elastic, uncertain what damage massive quantities of these angry garments could inflict. Bruised skin from close-range, furious snappings would be the least of my concerns. Pit marks and scarring from metal clasps, asphyxiation by elastic strangulation—it was all possible.
I sympathized with the injustice heaped upon the undergarments, their inhumane storage in quarantine-like conditions within locked, pitch-black drawers. But I also pitied the unsuspecting young woman clerk, nearly out of her mind with fear over her own fate.
My call to 911 brought the police and firemen, who arrived just as the first garments snapped and stretched beneath the door, intent on their rubber-charged gallop down the street.
Their escape was short-lived. As chemicals from the firemen’s hoses quickly mixed with that of the garments, the lively snapping and popping of elastic turned into a gargling, bubbling goo as, in short order, the chemical reaction dissolved both the garments and their frenzied game plans. Within moments, the firemen’s hoses had turned the undies into melted mini-towers of pink and yellow and white sloppy glop.
From somewhere deep within the mass of melting cotton, nylon, Spandex and lace, there came a faint voice: “Ladies, stick together! We will rise again!”