| I’ve lived in US for 20 years. I knew very few brand names during the first 7-8 years, but knowing a lot more after raising a teenage daughter. A turning point was when Amy reached 7th grade. Before the 7th grade, students were not allowed to wear brand named clothes in schools. I remembered the hard tedious work to remove knitted name labels every time after buying new clothes, just to fit the school’s rule. That strict rule was lifted since the 7th grade. That was such a big change to Amy. She not only visited stores wildly, she also dragged me in because I had to drive her to the mall. I found it amazingly odd that I suddenly noticed a lot of stores that I never noticed before. I must admit I was blind for many years because I was here in the same mall many times. I swear that I never noticed these stores before, just to name a few for example: Banana Republic, Aeropostale, Abercrombie, Abercrombie & Fitch, Bui-Yah-Kah, dELiAs, Guess, Hollister & Co., Nine West, New York & Company, Urban Outfitters, Express, Forever21, Puma … Amy was such a cheap girl that she would like to buy a lot of good things but unwilling to spend. So she often looked at coupons. This ended up with visiting the stores more often than necessary if you paid the full price at once, but eventually you do save a lot of dollars, even cheaper than buying from no name stores. After she left for college, I look back at those shopping years with her. It became a nice memory of father-daughter weekend outing. We exercised a lot by touring the mall, likely 2-3 miles every weekend. Perhaps I benefited by losing some weight by not sure how much. To a teenage, it was a nice relaxing from busy school work. There was additional learning for a kid on budgeting, expenditure, purchase price control, and ultimately decision making or project management. At least she would know what to wear in colleges and beyond. |
