The Tale of the $15 Burberry Raincoats

Today is a pretty gross, rainy day in New York and after 80 and sunny in Florida this weekend, it is especially painful.  The one saving grace is that I finally have a chance to break out one of my beautiful tan Burberry raincoats to shield myself from all the yuck outside.  "Burberry raincoat?  Emily, you are a broke child who eats peanut butter and nutella sandwiches for lunch everyday.  How do you have not one, but two Burberry raincoats?"  Well, if you must know, it is a beautiful, slightly morbid story. 

So my parents are new transplants to Sarasota, Florida, the old people capital of the universe (except for my parents who are just pushing 30).  I'm not sure if you know about this, but old people have this horrible habit of dying and leaving homes filled with a lifetime of stuff for their families to sort through.  This is where the morbid part of this story comes in.  Well, consignment shops have popped up all over Sarasota to battle this epidemic-sized problem of old people dying.  These places are ripe for the picking, and I would know because my mother usually drags me to about 50 of them whenever I visit.  This past weekend was sort of lackluster in terms of finds, but I guess after two Burberry raincoats, everything sort of dims in comparison.

Alright, back to December.  My mom and I are perusing through the clothing racks at one of our favorite consignment shops and she calls to me.  "Emily, look at this!"  I think you can guess that she was holding a beautiful tan Burberry trench with the glorious price tag of $15 written on it.  I tried it on and it was one of those kismet moments of pure joy; it fit perfectly.  Unfortunately, there were also stains ALL OVER IT: pen stains, and what I am hoping were spaghetti sauce instead of the possible blood spots.  Now we have a dilemma.  What to do?  BUY THE $15 BURBERRY RAINCOAT.  An employee came over at this point to gush about how nice it looked and dropped this other little nugget of information into my lap.  "Can you believe there are two of these?  I can't believe they haven't been snatched up already!" Excuse me? 

There was another!  It would seem that a woman with deep pockets and beautiful taste (most of Sarasota) had passed away and her foolish or downright stupid family members dropped these two beauties off for my specific enjoyment.  I tried raincoat #2 on and low and behold, some higher power knew I was in desperate need of a win and this second coat fit even better than the first!  And with less pen stains and no blood/spaghetti sauce!  Dilemma 2: What do I do now?  BUY TWO BURBERRY RAINCOATS.  My mom very nicely offered to take them to a dry cleaner and send them up to me in New York after they came back.  A few weeks later I was blessed with two almost new, relatively stain-free beautiful Burberry trenchs thus concluding the tale of $15 Burberry raincoats. 

I am relatively sure these will go down as the greatest deal in the history of history.  And boy do they look good; a homeless man on the street called me gorgeous which I am attributing to my snazzy new coat.