Lingerie, or the lack thereof

Completely off-topic:

Been buying some new lingerie this week, and noticed something odd. Most of the “lingerie” shops seem mostly packed with “lounge” clothes. For every one merry widow or skimpy silk chemise, there were 10 sets of flannel pajamas, t-shirts, and sweat pants.

Am I nuts, or is this fucking bullshit? PJs are easily found in all the department stores. T-shirts are ubiquitous, and sweats can be gotten at any number of sports stores. Why the fuck have they taken over the lingerie shops and started to edge out actual lingerie?

I guess I first noticed this years ago with the mail orders, where you could get all sorts of skanky stuff at Frederick’s but then at Victoria’s Secret it seemed to be 50/50 lingerie and stupid lounge crap. I guess there’s a contingency of dumb broads who assume the label is what counts so if you buy your sloppy sweatpants from a store that’s known for sexy lingerie that somehow the sweatpants become sexy through osmosis across the warehouse floor. (Frederick’s has a few sweatpants too, but they have the decency to not emphasize this point.)

And I remember years ago La Vie En Rose had one little corner with flannel PJs and other ain’t-getting-fucked-tonight shit, but the rest was bras and panties and actual lingerie. Was in La Vie En Rose at my local mall a couple days ago and now the situation is reversed: mostly sexless lounge crap, one wall of bras, and one corner of lingerie.

(Not that that stopped me from raiding the one good corner, but still…)

This is why eBay is kicking retail ass: can filter out all the crap and have hundreds of options of $1-15 “Lady Sexy Babydoll Lingerie Lace Strappy Mini Dress Nightwear” from China, much of it with free shipping. Which then creates more of a sense that no one’s buying lingerie at the supposed lingerie stores, so then they start stocking even more ugly sweatpants instead of lingerie, so there’s even less reason to browse rather than hit the online stores…

Folks, this is how HMV went from being a music store to a music and DVDs store to a DVD store to non-existent. And as I’ve ranted on before, online shit is only one part of this, the rest was the death spiral of ever dwindling selection to the point where music buyers stopped wasting their time popping in to browse as there was less and less worth buying in the store.

But the real question is: do people not fuck any more? Or at least not bother putting any effort into it?