Dear Burlington Coat Factory

The Neverending Story.  Pinocchio.  Richard Nixon.  Stephen Glass.  Peter the Apostle.  And now, Burlington Coat Factory.  Are you enjoying your entry into the greatest liars in the history of mankind?

This weekend was not the first time you've done me harm.  When I was two, my mother took my sister and me to the original Burlington Coat Factory in Burlington, NJ.  Back then, you were a clothier known mainly for your selections in outerwear, even though you did dabble in other garments.  This particular trip was made to get my sister an Easter dress.  Either my mother felt I did not deserve some springtime finery, or she was rightly worried that whatever nice thing I was given would either be ripped off while I screamed "IT'S TOO HOT!" or it would be inexplicably covered in maple syrup within minutes.  Seriously, this is how she dressed me when I was little:

My mother obviously didn't want grandchildren, at least not through me.  My sister could have nice dresses. I got short shorts and halter tops.  It's like were were both playing Julia Roberts in Pretty Women, but I got the early parts of the movie, where she was just an unwashed whore. 

Regardless, I was forced to endure my sister prancing like a princess around while I was given nothing but a baggie of cheerios and a new-found understanding that the world loved my sister more than it loved me.  As I tried to climb onto a bench to eat my cheerios and sulk, the bench proved to be just too high.  I slipped, but luckily I stopped the descent with my face, splitting the skin next to my eye and marring my beauty for life.  Your poorly proportioned changing rooms caused a head injury that most likely has been the only thing that has kept me from being an internationally recognized genius and sex symbol.  To make matters worse, when the doctor gave me a lollipop after I got stitches, he also gave my sister one.  Little Greg saw how cruel the world was that day.

Yesterday, almost twenty seven years to that bleak day, I drove to the Burlington Coat Factory in Annapolis, Maryland, hoping to get a new leather jacket.  My current jacket was purchased back during a brief period called my early and mid twenties, when I had what doctors refer to as a "horrific problem with overeating".  The theory was that it may have been based off of a traumatic head injury early in life.  Now, this jacket is much too large, and I have been looking for a nice replacement.  Having had no luck near my town, I decided that your store would be my best bet, seeing as how the word "Coat" is in your name, and coat is the Polynesian word for jacket. 

I entered the cavernous warehouse of a store, and quickly located the hanging sign for Men's section, and the other for "Big and Tall".  After checking every aisle, it became clear that the only things for sale were shirts and pants.  Nary a jacket, coat, cape or cloak was to be found.  Also puzzling was that your "Big and Tall" section consisted only of shirts 4X and larger.  Big was out in full force, but it seemed that Tall had left town for fear of being eaten.  Even though the store has roughly 111,947 square feet of floor space, the only people actually working at the store were located at the two register, which were clear across the store from the Big and Obese section.  They pointed me to a set of escalators even further away, telling me that the coats were all located on the second floor.

No bad day was ever made worse by a ride on an escalator, especially not one as tall as this one.  You are very clever to have such a wondrously long escalator ride to the coats, because had I not gotten that giddy ride, things would have deteriorated much quicker than they eventually did.

The escalator dropped me off in the midst of a rabble of cribs, strollers and children's things.  Next to that were haphazard aisles of bedding, rows of cheap toys, and odds and ends for a kitchen.  It looked like TJ Maxx and Marshall's dumped all of the things that were too awful for even them to sell.  Most disconcerting was an aisle of umbrellas that looked like Mary Poppin's arsenal.  Finally, I was able to find a sign that said "Women's Coats".  There was a modest selection, spread over a few aisles, and past those, I finally found the men's coats.

I may be prone to exaggeration, but if you had more than ten racks of coats, I will eat one of the several piles of discarded popcorn and pretzels I saw littering the floors of you store.  Every coat was black, or grey, and there were only three coats that were sized XXL, none of which were leather, and none of them were tall.  When I tried one of them on, mostly because I refused to admit total defeat, my arms were stuck in what was clearly only a size large jacket, labeled as 2xl.  Traditional methods of extraction were proving fruitless, and I began to frantically struggle to free myself.

Apparently, your workers only make themselves known when a large man in an undersized jacket is making high pitched sounds and thrashing about your barren Men's Coat section.  Not one, but two workers that were nowhere to be seen previously showed up and asked me if everything was alright.  I assured them that no, things were not alright, and that I feared that things would never be alright again.  They gingerly freed me from my gabardine tomb, and stepped aside as I regained my dignity, and took a less enjoyable ride on the down escalator and out of your awful store.

If you are marketing yourself as a "Coat Factory", perhaps you should have more than thirty coats on hand.  The coat per capita of your store is probably small enough to be a fraction.  This is false advertising.  Either get more coats, or change the name of the store to "Burlington Factory of Cheaply Made Shirts, Ugly Pants, Knockoff Cologne, Broken Household Items, Dirty Floors, and a few Small Jackets."  It is your choice, I don't care which.  Look at it this way: do I call myself Greg "Waffle Baron" Fisher, simply because I make delicious waffles about once a month?  Was I referred to as The King of No Pants because I took my pants off one time at a party?  No, I did that a bunch of times to earn that moniker.

Being a Coat Retailer is not like being a felon.  You are not marked by something because you did it one time.