Just for the Record…Buying a Shirt, Wearing It, Stinking It Up, and Returning It Is Not, I Repeat NOT a Method of Consumer Reduction. So Knock It Off Stinkpit!
If you are looking for designs, chat about greening the house, or just delightful banter of any kind…today is not your day. Pure 100% rant day. Over the weekend I was granted a few precious hours to shop…by myself…for a few dressier outfits for my upcoming vacation. Something really fancy…like with no snot or peanut butter streaks. Now my choices are fairly limited by my Ban on the Gap and a rather short shopping attention span. (Yeah, the ban is STILL on baby!) I like Ann Taylor. They have a lot of petites that still look like adult clothes and, in general, I find their clothes hold up pretty well both in style and construction. (Plus wooden hangers :).) Background story: awhile back I bought a nice little top at the same store. Brought it home. Thought about how cute I looked for a few hours. Tried it on with some pants and suddenly caught a whiff of foul play. The shirt was preBOed! Uggggggg. Not normal human BO either…swampthing level BO. The kind of BO that makes you beg for the sweet smell of a potato so rotten it has liquified. But it was REALLY cute so I soldiered on and washed it with my crappy eco detergent…twice. Life continued. (I have yet to find an eco detergent that actually cleans…but that is for a whole other rant day.) 
Now flash forward to this weekends outing…found a couple of cute shirts on the sale rack. My size and a good price. Versatile. Perfect. But oh no…the smell. The same wretched BO. Some woman in my neighborhood, the same size, with the same obvious good taste is buying my potential clothes stinking them up and returning them! SO NOT COOL STINKPIT! Despite whatever stink haze has permeated your brain & caused you to believe this is a valid way of reducing your consumer goods tally…it is so not OKAY. Watch out…I’ll be sniffing for you.
Have you tried Biokleen? I’ve been using it for several months and it works for me. You only need a little bit, I even use less than the recommended amount. We have lots of dirty, dusty hiking clothes and my boyfriend’s “pitted out” shirts, and they come out fine.
I have not tried that one. Where do you buy it?
I used to work in a kid’s department of a store and people would return shit with spit-up on it. People are foul.
After I had this experience repeatedly, moth ball smelling clothes from the thrift store didn’t seem like such a bad thing anymore. People are disgusting.
And I thought you were going to wear muu muus?
I am not against thrift sores..just find them really time consuming and impossible with the gremlins in tow. Plus…I’ve lost track of the good ones. I am going to step up my efforts when Thing One goes to school in the fall. The uniformity of a store like Gap/Banana is nice for ordering the basics on line, but is also a little boring. My husband used to complain when I bought his work shirts at Banana or even Brooks Brothers that he would walk into his office and half his coworkers would be wearing the same thing.
Organicneedle, I get the Biokleen at Whole Foods.
I’ve had luck with Ecover powdered laundry detergent–even for my sweat-soaked gym clothes. I’ve also recently been using soapnuts with good results too.