Logos

I'm taking a train trip to Chicago later on this week and I decided that it would be convenient to have a duffel bag to carry whatever clothes and other stuff I need for the trip. I'm not going to need to bring very much stuff with me, so an actual piece of luggage just seems like overkill. A decent-sized duffel bag would be perfect and easy to carry around. So yesterday, I went about the task of visiting a few sporting goods stores to search for my new duffel bag.

First of all, boy did I not realize how much of a pain in the ass it is to find such a simple thing. Most of the stores just didn't have any. They had backpacks, luggage, and nothing in between. One of the stores did have some simple, reasonably-priced duffel bags but they only had really small ones or massively huge ones. The medium-sized ones were sold out. Bleah.

However, the real annoying thing was that other than the one place I just mentioned, the stores that did have duffel bags only had ones with giant logos plastered all over them. Pretty much every single one had some massive adidas, reebok, or under armour logo taking up every available square inch of surface area. I don't understand it. Why the hell would I want to walk around with some company's giant logo strapped over my shoulder? They're not paying me to advertise for them, and believe me, the bags sure as hell aren't priced any cheaper to account of the free mobile billboard service you'd be providing were you to buy one of the things.

So needless to say, I didn't buy one of those damn things. I would have felt like one of those guys who gets paid to stand on the corner at a busy intersection holding a sign about some furniture store going out of business. I guess I'll just be bringing a suitcase on my trip.

It does make me realize though, this isn't exactly an uncommon problem today (although most people probably couldn't care less about it, unlike me). There's freaking logos on just about everything. It's hard to buy any kind of clothes or bags or other wearable stuff, or electronics or anything that doesn't have a prominent logo front-and-center.

One of the worst examples I've seen is belts. I've seen many belts either in stores or actually being worn by people that have a big logo or a designer's name on the belt buckle. Why would a guy want to walk around with some other dude's name above his crotch? Yet I've seen people wearing these things. I just don't get it.