I did a little shopping after Christmas. I enjoy a bargain just like anyone else, so I wanted to see what I could get on the cheap. I made out OK. I got a DVD (the first season of “Arrested Development”), two pairs of pants and two pairs of shoes.

All told, I spent about $120. I generally would not like to part with that much money for clothes, but the sales helped me pry open my wallet.

Thank goodness I’m not a trendy woman.
Don’t take that as a knock on the female gender as a whole. But an article I read over the holidays almost made me fall off a chair.

Did you know that women will pay almost $200 for a pair of jeans? One pair.

I don’t think I could put together an outfit from my entire wardrobe that cost $200. Maybe if I wore two layers.

One woman estimated she had spent $10,000 on jeans over two years. Some of them have even come with pre-made holes. I live in the only thing I have spent $10,000 on in the past two years. And I could probably pay it off quicker if I sold the old jeans in my closet for more than $100.

The boyfriend of one of the women profiled in the story had the most sane outlook on the whole thing. “They should cook you breakfast for that much money.” He’s letting them off easy. I’d want surf and turf.

Luckily my wife doesn’t have extravagant tastes in clothes. She was equally amazed by the story, which almost celebrated expensive jeans.

I wondered if we were an anomaly. Maybe everyone else is buying up these special jeans and walking around with magical powers while we suffer in our ignorance. So I asked some friends how much they would spend on jeans.

I only found a few friends who would spend more than $50 for jeans. And a bunch of them were male. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Someone told me that polling my friends probably didn’t hit the target market for $200 jeans. That’s true, but I didn’t want a cross-section of opinion. I wanted people to tell me I was right.

Still, I couldn’t believe what I had read. They had to be making it up. No one in their right mind could buy one pair of jeans approaching $200, much less fill an entire closet with $10,000 of denim.

So I went to the place where we can find all the right answers – the Internet. If you read it online, it must be true.

I did a search and found some of these brands of jeans that these women can’t live without. These people are laughing all the way to the bank.

One of them charges $132 for a denim mini-skirt. I could probably salvage enough fabric from the jeans I don’t wear to make a half-dozen of these the things are so small.

The company (I’m not giving up their name until they pay me for advertising their scam) starts their jeans at $121. I can buy three DVD players for that much. And probably have money left over for a pair of jeans.