The other day, my mom told me that Squirt (remember her?) mentioned she wanted a hat with earflaps. With the kid’s birthday fast approaching, I hopped right on it and texted her to ask what color she wanted. Her response was: anything but green. Now, as it happens, all I seem to own in my stash is green yarn in varying shades. The only exception is this awesome red/orange/yellow yarn I picked up a couple of years ago, from a LYS in Princeton. For, like, 2 years I debated what I wanted to do with these two skeins of gorgeousness. a hat? A scarf? A man cowl? Now it finally had a purpose.
I cranked out the hat in 3 days (no joke), thanks to the freak snowstorm we had last weekend and a long overdue Buffy marathon. After all the smoke and yarn fragments had cleared, I had about ¾ of the 2nd skein left. I’d hoped to be able to make a scarf out of that 2nd skein (either for myself or the kid), but it seems that the enormous pom-pom used way more yarn than I had anticipated. I figured I could just find it online and order another skein to finish the scarf; no biggie. Long story short, I only found 1 store online that had the color I was looking for and, it turns out, they were about $3 more expensive than anyone else selling the same yarn. Believe it or not, that didn’t bother me, though. I bought the yarn I needed, plus two additional skeins of a different colorway (possibly for the aforementioned scarf/hat/man cowl). In the “notes to seller” section of the transaction, I requested that the 4 skeins be wound*. A few hours later, I get an e-mail back telling me (very politely) that the store charges $2 a skein and that I should reply if I still wanted it wound. I replied back that I didn’t want it wound; not for an extra $8. I was disappointed, because I like being able to use yarn “right out of the box”, but I let it go.
While I waited for that yarn to come, I went to my favorite online yarn shop and bought some other yarn for a few other projects I have on my brain. I bought 6 skeins and spent about the same amount. Then I asked them if they would “kindly wind the skeins, please”, having had it done in the past, gratis. I wasn’t sure if my previous experience was due to the fact that I only bought 3 skeins or what, but I prepared myself to be told “no” or that they’d started charging (in the 3 months since my last purchase). The next day, I got an e-mail confirm that my yarn was on its way and that that it was wound “gladly”.
but back to the 1st batch.
I open the envelope to find my 3 skeins, a complimentary tea bag and 2 requests for feedback. The yarn for Squirt’s scarf was fine, so I wound it on the borrowed swift and tucked it into my man-purse to continue on the bus the next day. The other two looked…weird. The labels were obvious photocopies and, though they were the same yarn company, were bundled different than the one for Squirt. Even after I wound them, the cakes looked strange, so I weighed them** and both cakes were short .2 ounces. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s a few feet worth of yarn or a couple of inches in a scarf.
They asked for feedback so I sent them an e-mail, this morning, telling them why I wouldn’t be shopping there again.
See, I don’t have a problem being charged a little more for a luxury item, when it’s something hard to come by (like a certain colorway of a certain yarn); that’s good Old Fashioned, American Capitalism-supply and demand- in action. The “winding fee” annoys the crap out of me, though, since the actual winding of a ball of yarn costs the vendor nothing; it’s just good customer service. It’s the vendor saying “you just dropped $60 (plus shipping) in my store and I want you to shop here again; I’ll take 10 minutes and wind these for you; maybe you'll tell all your friends on Ravelry where you got that awesome yarn”. Something like that makes the inflated price seem worth paying and I probably would’ve shopped there again, had the skeins not been light. That’s not overcharging, that’s stealing from me.
*not all yarn comes “ready to use”. Some are sold in “hanks” or “skeins” that have to be wound into “cakes” using a yarn swift or hand wound into the traditional ball of yarn, if you don’t own a yarn swift. Balling yarns is ridiculously time consuming, so I usually wind it at the LYS or borrow the swift I bought my mom for Mother’s Day, if I can get over to her place.
** yarn is sold in certain increments of length versus weight; using both measurements you can determine how much you’ll need for a project and how the project will turn out.
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