Inga: Internet Fail Purchases (My Yak Sweater)

Now that Olof and I are retired, our sartorial style can best be described as “early orphan.” The vast majority of our wardrobes come from either LL Bean or Lands End.

It helps that we know what sizes are going to fit us so we rarely have to return anything. And for Olof, so long as it’s blue, it’s going to be fine.

Let me be clear that there is nothing inherently orphan-ish about these brands which we think produce very nice and functional clothing for the price. It’s that we wear them until they’re practically rags. Especially one of us, who is not me.

What I eventually have to do is spirit the latest ratty sweatshirt out of Olof’s closet and pretend it is in the wash until he finally forgets about it, and is forced to wear the second rattiest sweatshirt he owns. “Olof,” I say, “we are not poor. I am afraid people are going to start leaving clothing donations on our front porch in the dead of night.”

In his defense, I have been known to over-wear certain favorite garments myself but never to the degree that he does. We both had to wear office clothes for so many years that I think we’re reveling in not having to wear anything that has recently seen an iron.

My older granddaughter has observed that I dress like a barista from a lesser trattoria. Hey, black and white works! It goes with everything!

But every once in a while, I go wild and crazy and order from other sites than my usual ones. Such was the case recently when I saw what looked like a really pretty cashmere sweater on sale at a shockingly low price. The return instructions seemed deliberately vague. If you needed to return it, you were to contact a specific website for “further instructions.”

That should have warned me right there. In my defense, it looked like an American company – OK, it had a very American-sounding name – but I was puzzled as to why it was taking forever to come.

A month later a package showed up from China with all manner of foreign stickers on it. I had a bad feeling about it.

Now the China part wasn’t necessarily bad. Apparently the finest cashmere comes from the soft fiber combed from the underbelly of Mongolian goats. Such animals are not to be found in the Continental US but reside just to the north of China.

I’m not on social media but from time to time on the internet, people will post photos of what they think they ordered and what actually showed up.

As soon as I opened the package, I was sure it was a mistake. It bore no resemblance in either color or style to the pretty sweater I’d ordered.

One thing was clear: this hairy garment was not cashmere. No Mongolian goats had ever had their bellies combed in its creation. So what hirsute creature had contributed to this apparel? Yak? Gnu? Yeti?

Personally, I’m going for yak.

There were absolutely no tags in it indicating the company that made it and definitely no label for the care of fine faux-goat fabrics of a yak-Yeti-gnu persuasion.

Unfortunately, it photographs far better (and less hairy) than it looks in person – which, of course, is how I got suckered into buying it. Trust me when I say that this is one ugly, shapeless garment. One can only wonder if it started out as roadkill.

I have to say I’ve been duped on a few other China purchases, which like this one, didn’t indicate on the website that it was coming from China.

I ordered a digital thermometer during the pandemic since there were none in existence in any pharmacy in the Continental U.S. But Amazon seemed to think it could provide me with one. It finally showed up from China three months later and was Centigrade-only. Not even a conversion chart. The battery was also dead, probably having succumbed during the slow boat trip from Asia.

I also got duped on some bamboo compression socks. Now, bamboo is not grown in quantity in the U.S. so you have to assume it’s probably coming from a place where bamboo IS grown, like China. I’m sure there are a lot of legitimate and very therapeutic bamboo compression socks out there, but these weren’t among them. Once again, they took forever to come and came in packaging that was entirely in Chinese lettering. Even though I had ordered according to the size chart on Amazon, I don’t think these socks could have fit a five-year-old. If I’d read the fine print on Amazon’s site, I would have seen the notation “frequently returned item.” Um, yeah. Not sure why Amazon is still entertaining these folks as suppliers.

I’ve been trying to decide what to do with my yak-Yeti-gnu sweater. I have to say that my first reaction on opening it was “Goodwill bin!” As I suspected, the return options were basically, “it’s yours now, sweet cheeks!” And since it wasn’t Amazon, there wasn’t really any recourse. The yak-gnu farm in China clearly didn’t want it back, nor the vehicle that originally ran it over.

Meanwhile, it’s time for me to spirit Olof’s favorite sweatshirt into the trash. Even Goodwill would be insulted.