Where Did All the School Uniforms Go?

This Summer as school approached we attempted to buy Charlotte a school uniform as cheaply as we could.  It wasn’t easy.  Her sneaky school has been rather devious with colour and pattern selection and the aqua coloured shirts, jumpers, hats and interesting check dresses can only be purchased from them.  I looked everywhere for plain shirts in a similar colour that I could embroider the school logo onto with my sewing machine.  So while everyone else in Canberra is buying plain coloured polo shirts for $6 and generic blue and white check dresses for $20 at Lowes I am forking out $50 for a dress and $25 for a polo shirt – albeit with a screen printed school logo.

The one area where the price-gouging fell down was in the pants and skirts area.  Plain navy blue anything is the order of the day.  Pretty standard and almost always available – I was cheering.  Except for some reason this year they weren’t available anywhere.

Four weeks before school started I managed to score the only two pairs of size 6 navy blue shorts in Kmart.  Nay – the only two pairs of size 6 navy shorts in Canberra.  I was assured that while “we didn’t seem to get much in we’ve been told there’s more on the way.  Six weeks of religiously checking back and I’ve still got bupkis.  Target and BigW have been just as hopeless.

Fast forward to March and I decided that now that Canberra mornings are getting crisper than refrigerated Granny Smith apples, it’s time to invest in some black stockings to go with Charlotte’s school dress and some navy blue trackpants for when the colder weather really hits.  Unfortunately Kmart failed me again.  Their tracksuit stand was filled with bizarrely coloured garments that fell neatly into the category between “pretty enough for casual wear” and “school uniform”.  Worse, the socks and hosiery section revealed no stockings of any kind.

Locating a Kmart store person to find out if I was merely late to the party or whether the real stuff hadn’t arrived yet I was reliably informed that that’s pretty much it although “we’ve been told there’s more on the way.”

I eyed Mr Kmart Drone carefully and asked how business in the children’s clothing business was going anyways.

“Well,” he replied, “we’ve cut our prices dramatically and yet we’re still not moving anywhere near as much stock.”

I asked him whether it had occurred to them that there could be a correlation between low sales and failure to stock anything that remotely looks like a school uniform.

It literally looked like a lightbulb went off in his head.  With something like 10,000 school kids on the Northside alone you’d think that someone somewhere would have figured out that plain-coloured clothing suitable for school uniforms might account for a fair whack of business.  Apparently not.  *sigh*  Back to the school uniform shop for some $40 slacks.