missoni madness

A post from a facebook friend reminded me that today was the launch of the Missoni collection at Target, so while running errands at lunch I went to check it out. Unlike the experience of the facebook poster, who said she saw 30 women in line before her store even opened, there was actually merchandise left to buy. But holy cow was it going fast! Everywhere you looked there were women with cartloads and arms full of Missoni chevron stripes.

While I totally forgot this was coming out today, apparently there are a lot of other people who have been counting down the days. The Target website crashed and many stores were completely sold out of their stock by 9 a.m.!

I grabbed a few things, including some really sweet purple ties for Matt, and the last one left of these pillows:



After work I stopped at a different store to see if I could find another of the same pillow, only to find the shelves were totally empty. With the exception of just a few sparse items, everything was gone. I asked a couple of women who worked there if it was as crazy as it looked it and wide-eyed, they shook their heads in disbelief. But they also shared that they expect more shipments to come in soon and recommended calling first thing in the morning to see if what I wanted came in. Thanks Target ladies!

As I shopped, I noticed a young girl and her Dad checking out the few things that were left, clearly disappointed. She started with the bedding, but what she wanted was gone, then I saw her looking at the candles, then accessories, but always walking away empty-handed. When I ran into her on my way to check out, I stopped and told her what I learned about future shipments. She smiled, and thanked me, obviously relieved.

After I got in my car, I realized I knew the girl. She joined my lacrosse team a couple of years ago but had to quit for financial reasons. Then it hit me. The reason the stores are all empty is because there are total assholes out there buying all of it up and reselling it on ebay. I checked ebay when I got home and sure enough, as of 6 p.m. there were more than 9,300 listings of Missoni for Target merchandise - merchandise that just went on sale today. I just checked again and now there are more than 13,600 listings. Many items are listed for five times what Target is selling them for!

The whole point of Target doing these kinds of collections is to make select brands more accessible. But greedy people gobbled up all of the merchandise within hours and now the same girls who have been bombarded by the ad campaign for this stuff, who don't have a lot of disposable income (unlike the women who bought thousands of dollars worth of merchandise to resell), can't get their hands on any of it. That just sucks. I hope there are truckloads and truckloads of Missoni for Target out there, just waiting to get to the stores, so all the high school girls out there get exactly what they want, and the jerks trying to resell on ebay get stuck with everything they don't.