The Twilight Zone

On Sunday me and one of my bridesmaids had an encounter with the Twilight Zone!

A month or so ago I saw an advert online for a wedding dress sale. The website billed it as a large national event taking place in cities across the country. It said that there would be rails of dresses all heavily discounted from £100. This sounded exactly what I was looking for as we are on a bit of a tight budget. A sale was happening in Guildford so I booked two tickets so me and my bridesmaid could go along.

The sale was taking place in Debenhams so we set off on Sunday and head to the Debenhams car park. Well this was the weirdest car park in the world! Debenhams being a large department store we were expecting the car park to be fairly large. First off to get into it I had to drive down the most narrow and steepest slope I have ever seen. It felt a bit like a roller coaster it was so steep! Once we got in the first thing I said was "is this it?!" It was soooooo small. There were probably about 40 spaces and half of those were for staff. A lot of the spaces blocked others in so you could quite easily go shopping and come back to find you can't get your car out. We were lucky though and managed to park. It was lucky I have a small Ford KA though as I had negotiate into a space through cars, vans and posts.

So once parked we went up to the bridal dress department in the store for our appointment which was at 2pm. There was no one around. No customers, no staff. We eventually found a staff member who worked in a different department who then told us the bridal staff member was on her lunch break until 2.30! Remember we were expecting a large sale with lots of people around! Eventually the lady was dragged away from her lunch who was then rude to us telling us that she didn't know we were coming and our ticket meant nothing to her!

While we had been waiting for the lady we had been looking at the dresses. There was one small rail of sale dresses and the two large rails of dresses priced mainly over £1000. The cheapest we could find on the sale rail was over £500. Again remember the advert claimed there were lots of dresses from £100! There was one dress I particularly like the look of on the sale rail but it was really grubby with even sweat marks on the armpit areas!

The lady asked if we new what we were looking for and we told her we wanted something that had straps and came in at the waist and hips. The lady then pulled out a few dresses all of which were strapless and a lot of them were definitely not tailored at the waist/hip area. I don't think that she was listening to a single word we were saying. We had to repeat over and over again 'we want something with straps.'

Eventually we chose 3 or 4 to try on but I knew straight away that I would not be buying anything. They were all out of my price range. The first one I tried on was the sale one I mentioned earlier with the grubby marks. It was also the best one. My bridesmaid tried to get her down on the price as we would have to pay for dry cleaning. They were still wanting £699 for the grabbiest dress I had ever seen and on top of that I would have to pay £65 for dry cleaning (she claimed this was cheap) and then a further £150 for the alterations needed. £905 for a dress that had been tried on so much it had sweat marks!

In the end I was honest with the sales lady and told her that the whole thing was not what I was expecting and not as the advert had portrayed it. She said that there had been a couple of £100 dresses  the day before but they had sold and besides 'they weren't very nice!' I couldn't believe she said that about things she was selling. One of those buyers may have been a friend of mine for all she knew! She then went out the back and brought a dress out which she thought might be more in my 'price range'. I never found out how much it was in the end as it was so completely opposite to what we had described we wanted that I was just a bit shocked! My bridesmaid was obviously also shocked as she gasped and then blurted out 'she's not 60 you know!!!' At that I just couldn't keep a straight faec anymore or stay in the store. We made a brisk exit laughing.

So all