Saturday, January 11, 2014

The Story of the Unobtainable TARDIS Dress

For those of you who don't know me, I'm a huge fan of the show Doctor Who.  My family has learned of this and I receive many Doctor Who gifts (I'm not complaining, keep them coming).  One such gift this year was a fabulous TARDIS dress from Hot Topic, pictured below.  (For non-Whovians, the TARDIS is the Doctor's time-traveling machine which stands for Time and Relative Dimension in Space).

I loved the dress but I noticed they got me a size Medium which I would normally get a size Small.  "No big deal," I thought.  Usually a Medium is okay, otherwise I'll just exchange it for a Small, we have a Hot Topic in our mall.

It was a while until my fiance and I got around to going to the various stores where we had returns or exchanges to make and where we had gift cards to because of all the different events going on around the holidays.  But Jan 2 was finally a calm enough day.  I almost had forgotten to try the dress on to see if I needed to exchange it, but before we went out I tried it on and it was a tad baggy in the chest.

I get to Hot Topic to return my items (there were other things that I already had or didn't fit as well).  I wanted to check to see if they had a Small before I returned it because I thought if not, I could make it work because I really liked the dress.  But, of course, I forgot to do that and headed straight to the counter to begin my returns.

I told the checkout person that with that dress I wanted a Small and if he knew if they had any more.  He said he believed they didn't but he will check in the back for me.  (Keep in mind this was after it had already been returned.)

He checked in the back . . . . none left.

Okay.  "Can you check to see if another store in the area has one?"

He checked on the computer at the checkout . . . .

"It's not coming up with anything.  Let me check this other computer.  It works better."

He checks the other computer . . . .

"There's only one in Shasta and one in Chico."

"Great.  Can you have that sent to this store?"

"Ooooooo I hate to tell you this . . .  But they just stopped letting us do that . . .  yesterday."

"Oh."  WHAT?!!!!  Not only is it crazy that a lot of stores don't do that anymore, but my fiance and I were going to do this a couple days ago.  Grrrrrrrr.  Very frustrating.

"Do you want me to put one of them on hold and you can pick it up?"

"Haha.  I'm not that desperate for it."  They are roughly 2 to 3 hours away.  It's okay, I'm sure I can find it online.  "Can you see if it's online?"

"Sure."  He tries to check.  "Sorry the internet's not working."

I'm still hopeful.  Even if I can't get it on their website, I should be able to find it somewhere else online.  When we get home, I immediately look.  I can't find it on their website.  I'm getting pretty nervous now that I returned this dress I love and may not be able to get it again.  So I check my go to site, Amazon, they have everything.  Not there.  Starting to panic a little.

Well obviously this dress is only made by Hot Topic and therefor is hard to find other than through them directly.  Except one place, ebay.  I check out ebay.  I think I see it!  Yay!  Cool how much is it?  $60?!  WHAT?!

The original price for this dress was around $32.  If you could find one at Hot Topic right now, they are on sale for $13.  This is ridiculous.

I search the whole internet, nobody else has it for sale.

Well I reluctantly order the dress on ebay for $64.  That night, trying to go to sleep, I stay up pondering what I can do to offset the insane cost of a dress that was supposed to be a gift.  After a while, it finally came to me.  I will go back to the Hot Topic where I returned the original dress, and get that with the gift card I had and then resell that one on ebay for the high price.  Let's hope they still have it because this must be a really popular dress.

The next day I went back and luckily they still had it.  So now here's my ebay listing for the original dress.  I started it a little high, but it is a dress that there are very few left of, especially in a popular size like Medium, so why not?  Let's see if I can sell it that high.  After a week if it hasn't sold yet, I will probably lower it.  I'll update this post when it has sold. 

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