Retail Therapy?

For my excursion project, I knew I wanted to go on the shopping excursion. I love to shop, and sometimes I hate myself after spending so much all in one day. This project at least gave me an "excuse" to be in stores, but not buy anything. I went to both an adult and children stores, but I did each on different days. I walked around to the different children's stores here in the city right before a really nice weekend. 

Two of the children's stores were definitely more expensive and a lot different in atmosphere than the other one was. I went into the Ralph Lauren Children's store and to the Crewcuts section of J.Crew in a small town on Long Island. They were both definitely busy because it was a busy day in town that day. There were many families in the stores. I do no recall seeing many males in the children's stores alone at all. On the other hand, there were either moms with their kids, or women shopping alone. Men tended to be accompanied by their wives and kids or just another female. Taking a look at the graph I can see that there definitely was a difference in the price for t-shirts for boys and girls. There is a really wide range in the prices for the t-shirts. The Old Navy store was a bit different because it was in a different area and was not in a small town. It had women and men's clothes in the same store, so there was a greater difference in the amount of people and the gender of the people that were in the store. The prices for the Old Navy T-Shirts are clearly less and they also have a smaller range in the difference. There was not a difference between the boys and girls t-shirts in Old Navy like there was in Ralph Lauren and Crewcuts. The girls had a smaller range in price for t-shirts in Crewcuts while the Ralph Lauren girls t-shirts had less of a range than the boys t-shirts did. 

Clothing	Boys T-Shirts	Girls T-Shirts
Crewcuts	$14.50 - $34.50	$24.50 - $29.50
Ralph Lauren	$18 - $45	$19.50 - $69.50
Old Navy	$7.94 - $9.94	$7.94 - $9.94

The sweaters and sweatshirts on the other hand, had different results. The sweaters for girls seemed to start at a lower price than the sweaters for boys did, but they also seemed to have a wider range in price in some instances such as that of the Crewcuts sweaters. I did not find any sweatshirts/hoodies for girls in Crewcuts when I went. There were plenty of hoodies for boys, but I also found more variety in sweaters for girls than I did for boys. 

Clothing	Boys Sweater/Sweatshirt	Girls Sweater/Sweatshirt
Crewcuts	$44 - $49.50 / $42.50 - $58	$39.50 - $69.50/ No                               Sweatshirts
Ralph Lauren	$45 - $79.50 / $19.50 - $75	$34.99 - $79.50 /  $27.99 -                                 $44.99
Old Navy	$9.00 - $20	$10 - $25 / $7.99 - $18

The difference I saw at the Hugo Boss store at Columbus Circle was great compared to the children's stores I had gone into. I expected to see more people in the store since it is located in the city and there are many more people. When I went into the store, there weren't many customers in the store, there were only a handful. My cousin and I were the only female customers in the store. As I was looking around, checking prices, my cousin started laughing and I asked her what was wrong. We were in the women section of the small store and there was a female employee standing near us and there was a male employee a couple of feet away from us helping a male customer. My cousin said the man that was shopping, had just said he did not know what a skirt was. I am not sure if he did not know what a skirt was because of language difference because he sounded like he had a slight accent, but it was definitely an interesting thing to hear while being in the women section of a store. While we were in the store, not one female customer walked in the door. There was only one female employee and about five male employees that we saw while we were in the store. There were a handful of male customers in the store and then a couple more walked in while we were looking around. It was interesting to see that females did not walk into the store even though there is women clothes in there. The difference in price of the suit jackets were interesting and surprising. The men suit jackets were way more expensive than the women suit jackets and the men also had more variety in styles and colors than the women did. The price of a women's button down shirt being more expensive was interesting to see, also. 

Clothing	Hugo Boss Men	Hugo Boss Women
Suit Jacket	$795	$595
Button-Down Shirts	$175	$195

Going into H&M was the complete opposite of Hugo Boss. There were so many more people, even though Hugo Boss was on the first floor. The women's section was the first floor of the store and you had to go up a floor to go to the men's section. The women's section was madness. There were so many people, mostly girls and it was loud. There were employees saying that they could help people get rung up upstairs at the men's cash registers. In the men's floor, it was a lot quieter and men were looking through the clothes nicely and it was a lot calmer. I did not see much difference in price that I saw for the jeans, but the shirts seemed a little more expensive for the girls. Why? Were there more selection for girls in colors, or were they not as high in demand for girls?

Clothing	H&M Men	H&M Women
Basic T-Shirts	$5.95	$9.95
Skinny Jeans	$39.95	$39.95

The sunglass store, Solstice was a little like the children's store in the atmosphere and the people that were there. There weren't much men, but the handful of men that walked in while I was there, were in the company of a female. I did see a lot of difference in the prices of sunglasses for men compared to the females. Some sunglasses were more expensive for females and others were vice versa. Some sunglasses you could not tell if they were for females or for males, such as the Ray Bans, but the ones that you could tell that were females, were often times more expensive than the male's.  

Clothing	Solstice Men	Solstice Women
Prada Sunglasses	$315	$290
Ray Ban Sunglasses	$145	$160

Overall, there were some stores that were more expensive for men and others were more expensive for women. There were some stores and things that I felt varied in prices more for women than they did for men. I felt like there were a lot more variation in prices for women, maybe because they sometimes have more variety in colors and styles than men do. I found it interesting that I guess I never really look around and observe the atmosphere and the people that are inside stores. I think that I never have really paid attention to the difference in prices or the difference in genders in the different sections of stores. I never really shop for the opposite sex, but now I think that it's a little hard to not try to notice the different prices in the mens section or the difference in the crowd.