The name can be substituted with any never pay full price discount retail store, the kind that smell the same no matter how long it’s been since your last visit. Polyester and plastics, mostly. Familiar as the scent of a friend’s home.
You go there because you’re a clothes hound, but you’re cheap. You go because you once scored a leather bag there for $50 that you’d fallen in love with when it was $150 in a real department store. You go there because they’ll have that random kitchen utensil you need at half the price of Bed Bath & Beyond, even with one of those damn coupons. You go there because spandex is still spandex no matter what label it bears, and $90 stretchy pants are for suckers.
You’re no sucker. You love the hunt.
So each time a waft of recycled Marshall’s air hits you at the entrance, you go neanderthal, but, like, Anna Wintour neanderthal. Eyes conditioned to scan the size 6 shoe rack in less than 15 seconds, to zero-in on red clearance tags. Clear plastic hangers scream as they slide across the rack, no, no, no, no.
Inevitably though, they go quiet. Maybe two times out of ten, the sustained silence is your deliberation. You’re not in-Ryan-Gosling-love with it, but you like it. And it tastes like victory, so much that your husband smells it on your breath when you tell him how much this shirt originally cost.
Besides, after all that adrenal hunting, you have to have…something, right? Some carcass to drag into your cave, some fashion designer’s head on a spear, his suggested retail price vanquished.
The incubation period for the Marshall’s effect is typically 3–5 months — well past the 30-day full refund window.
First you notice a vague guilt with each glance at the empty dangling sleeve in your closet. This leads to sympathetic wearing (because clothes have feelings, you know) and a come-to-Jesus moment with your reflection in a storefront window. So by the time your neighbor hosts her next clothing swap, that puppy is in the bag. Not without more guilt, of course, translated into absurd calculations of cost-per-wear and vicious psychoanalysis of your commitment issues. If I don’t like it, why did I buy it?
Because of the Marshall’s Effect: choosing the best of the worst available. You had to have some thing.
Something fits nicely into a plastic bag, with a satisfying weight. Something fevers the way good bourbon and wool blankets do. Something feels luxurious, even if it’s synthetic.
Nothing is a form that fills your hands if you invite it to. Nothing hums slightly, and you recognize an old song. Under light and fingertips, you can read its verse in relief.
Nothing wears a sure smell, like cold, and shopping.
