I noticed something about my 3 pack of Hanes Premium shirts when throwing it into my basket at Target yesterday: the top of the bag is resealable. Well I’ll be damned. This is something that I’ve noticed before, but I didn’t notice notice it. I never really stopped to think about why that Ziploc-style technology is there.

I’m all for sealing my shirts in a bag and keeping them fresh; there is nothing like that first time you wear a shirt or pair of socks after buying them. You get that one day of pure absolute joy and then after the first washing they just become another t-shirt or another pair of socks. But here’s the problem: the 3 shirts are all stacked together like flapjacks, folded over a square of cardboard, and then secured together with a few pieces of clear tape. If you’re like me, you wear only one Hanes Premium t-shirt at a time. Am I supposed to remove the glob of shirts from the package, get my one shirt, and then fold and tape the two remaining shirts back onto the cardboard and stuff them back into the resealable bag? That seems like a lot of work, but it dawned on me that maybe that’s why my white t-shirts are “spoiling”. They seem to develop yellow stains in the pits after a while. Could it be because I’m not storing them in the resealable bag?

Call me crazy but I’ve always just removed them from the bag after buying, refolded them, and stashed ’em in my dresser drawer with my other white tees. Could it be that the yella pit stains are contagious and transfer from my old shirts to the new ones? Should I be throwing out the older ones and keeping the new ones that aren’t in use in the resealable bag just as an extra measure of protection? Do I need to have our dresser fumigated or swabbed for traces of yellow pit stain bacteria? Maybe a black light test is in order.. I saw that on Dateline once and haven’t looked at hotel room TV remote controls and faucet knobs the same since. One thing I’m guessing wouldn’t be too contaminated in a black light test is the bible in the nightstand drawer. Chances are if you’re someone who reads the bible you already have your own good book in tow laced with your own personal holy DNA and bacteria.

Back to the shirts in the resealable bag. I pay a premium for my premium shirts which I thought all this time was just for thicker fabric. The regular flimsy Kleenex-thin white tees reveal my chest hair and upper arm tats which is something I’m not cool with; it looks trashy and grody. But now I see part of that premium also goes towards the deluxe resealable packaging. Although I’m not going to dilly dally with stuffing my new shirts back in that bag I’ll at least try and repurpose it. It’s too bad they don’t make loaves of bread as tall and wide as the bag dimensions.. it would make a killer sandwich carrier. Perhaps Hanes could get into the bread business. Flatbread might work. Is there such thing as a square pita? The Ziploc-style seal is much nicer than those on the deli meat bags we get with the little white square pull tab that always falls off, so maybe the next time we go get a pound of smoked Boar’s Head toikey I’ll throw the bag at the clerk and say “Fillerup!” I will request a stack of extra large slices – that way I can also reuse the cardboard by taping the turkey slices onto it (that probably looks a lot cooler in my head than it does in written word form).

It would also make a good resealable bag for 45rpm records. The problem with that is I don’t have any. Part of the premium I pay is for this deluxe bag and I’m not just going to throw it away… At least not until I get a hold of the people at Dateline to do an expose on my theory of yellow pit stains being contagious to other shirts. I might have them bring the bag back to their labs to see if there’s some sort of stain-blocking particles in the bag that they could clone and turn into an underarm spray.