T-shirts are currency | Hacker News Reader

T-shirts are currency

blog.vivekhaldar.com

41 pointspatrick-james46 comments

"T-shirts are underwear"

-My father, who was born in 1941, didn't like me dressing in just a t-shirt.

I'm only 24, so maybe there was a skipped generation of influence and otherwise I'd be wearing t-shirts too. But I don't like to wear t-shirts, except under collared shirts or on extremely warm days or while gardening, etc.

I feel much more confident, professional, suave, etc when I'm wearing a collared shirt. I love a watch poking out, I love rolled up sleeves.

And yet I'd still be behooved into doing something for a t-shirt. I can't explain it.

"And yet I'd still be behooved into doing something for a t-shirt. I can't explain it."

I finished the Stripe Web CTF for a t-shirt. Felt extremely compelled to continue until I achieved t-shirt-vana...

Male-geek version of "she who dies with most shoes wins"?

Agreed, on both counts. I used to wear pretty much only white Ts and only as undershirts, but lately I've been collecting more and more graphic (but not too noticeable) Ts that work well under a collared shirt.

And if just rolling up the sleeves isn't enough for a manual labor situation, you can have a stylish undergarment!

"As our new CEO, Eric [Schmidt] wanted to control costs and to lay down the law his first day in Dodge. And I also wasn't surprised that Larry and Sergey hadn't bothered telling him our marketing group wasn't like others he might have worked with, or, if they had, that he hadn't believed them.

We nodded our heads and interjected, where we could, muttering amens and hosannas when he let us. He seemed to hear some of it. When we let him know that Google t-shirts were our biggest expense, he smiled approvingly.

'That's fine keep doing that. If someone likes our product enough to want to wear our brand, we should do everything we can to make it possible. And it's great for staff morale to have everyone decked out in the company logo.' He would soon be signing off on expenditures for preshrunk cotton in the seven-figure range...

'Why don't we have Google t-shirts for women?' Sergey demanded of me after a female visitor left the office with our standard extra-large men's t-shirt. He was as upset as I'd ever seen him. When a woman in France chastised him about American companies and their enormously oversized t-shirts that no French woman would wear, he insisted that we address the problem once and for all. I ordered women's shirts - more than I thought we could ever give away - but we couldn't keep them in stock. I didn't understand why they were so popular, given our limited female staff, until my cousin thanked me for the one I had sent her and added, 'They're quite see-through. Was that intentional?'

-"I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee 59", Douglas Edwards, p221-222

great anecdote! Also, see thru female t-shirts ftw ;)

I remember when I used to think like this. Now to me, a free t-shirt says the person wearing it doesn't really care about their appearance.

well, that's fair. I'd say I don't really care about my appearance. So?

I didn't say it was bad. Just a shift in perception from 'something of value' to 'something to send a social signal that maybe I don't want to send'.

Exactly, I remember one day throwing out (to good will) 20+ industry shirts, from events, vendors, prizes etc... because I reached an age where the social value wasn't there anymore, infact it became prohibiting towards being taken serious.

I look at the young guys I work with now getting all excited about vendor gear, smile, and reminisce about being the same age, but to me shirts are worthless (and as noted a stigma in some situations).

As has been said here many times just because you don't care about your appearance doesn't mean it isn't important to your life. People will judge you negatively based on it whether you care or not.

(or replace appearance with fashion)

Those people who judge you negatively are not going to be good friends - at best they would be some sort of aquaintance. Therefore, whether they judged you negatively or not is not going to matter to you in the least.

Unless of course that person is someone of authority over you - then you are screwd.

I wasn't referring to friends, I was thinking strictly professionally. Business associates, clients, etc.

One caveat: if you're going to make a t-shirt, do it right and spend the money to print it on decent material, i.e., soft, not scratchy, fitting decently, etc... (American Apparel's t-shirts are nice.) Any cheaply made t-shirts I get go straight to Goodwill.

Canvas triblend is a good alternative to American Apparel triblend, but is a bit cheaper

I don't even think this is necessary. I've done work that is totally beyond what is commensurate with reward for really shitty shirts.

Companies can almost certainly get by with poor materials, simply because most people don't account for that in the moment, and likely lack access to that information anyway.

But do you wear a shitty t-shirt after you receive it? Part of a company's motivation for giving out t-shirts is cheap publicity — people literally walk around with that company's logo on their chest. They're unlikely to do that though if the shirt fits poorly or is otherwise uncomfortable.

American Apparel's sizes for women are truly horrible. Large ones fit an average sized 10 year old.

It is very strange. I love the AA women's cuts, but they are way smaller than most women's clothing sizes. It's really awkward to give them out because I have to tell people that they're going to need a bigger size.

I don't quite get the analogy. Yes, things have value to people even if it isn't paper money. But saying "t-shirts are currency" carries about the same weight as saying "hugs are currency". Title seems misleading.

That's why we mail tshirts to customers who find bugs :)

we should talk, working on something to do this. would love to find out more about how you do this http://swagmate.startupthreads.com

nice. packing and shipping tshirts is a real drag, so I could see this being a really great service. signed up!

Yup, my friend's company gives t-shirt priority to people who've contributed to their open source project :)

While Tor will send a T-Shirt to anyone who runs a Tor Relay for a couple of months (and meets some basic bandwidth requirements).

https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/tshirt.html

When the companies are 'current', t-shirts can be used active in trade, much like valid currency in circulation in our economy.

When the companies shut down or get bought out, the t-shirts instead behave like old, defunct currency that become collectibles and memorabilia. They're items that evoke memories and eras gone by. I have a Conner Peripherals [1] shirt from 1994 that's in my drawer which someone in my family must have gotten from Finis; the t-shirt was made in celebration of a product launch that year [2]. The t-shirt design is godawful but it's endearing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conner_Peripherals

[2] I think Mozilla does this with their team shirts and shipping products, which like the OP says, definitely helps with team spirit.

Protip: if you want me to actually wear your tshirt often, get American Apparel 50/50 or comparable quality/comfort shirts.

I just donated 30 tshirts I didn't want to Goodwill. Only one of them was a 50/50 and it had a particularly ugly design.

Agreed, 50/50 is the best you can get (in terms of feel). I'd also add that you should work on making a design thats more about the essence of what your company does, rather than just a logo

And yet companies still continue to ignore the potential added value from giving the option of women's sizes.

We have some advice on women's tshirts on the geekfeminism wiki - maybe someone will find it useful!

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/T-shirts

Make sure you read the comment below by Mukund as well at: http://bestengagingcommunities.com/2011/12/31/why-mentos-is-..., where he talked about how Mentos act as currency in India. It's a short blip and there's nothing about its geographical significance nor how widespread the effect is. But it's still some post that provides an interesting look at other cultures and quite a fun read.

The same thing happenend in Argentina a few years ago. Not enough coins were coined, and since the bus used a machine that only took coins, thye were in high demand (there was even a point where you could sell coins for up to 120% of their nominal worth). It was obnoxiously common at teh time for drugstores to give you candy instead of change in coins, simply because they didn't have enough of them.

On a similar topic, I recommend this article about how Tide (yes, the detergent that comes in the memorable orange container) became a drug currency [1].

[1] http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/

I remember last year at SXSW, I was taking my box of tshirts back to the hotel so I could sort through and organize them. I put the box down for a second to give my friend a shirt. A mass of people flocked around me and within 20 minutes my box of 200 shirts was gone. People didnt even have a clear idea of that the shirts were for, but it had a heart on it so that was cool enough.

I'll heartily agree. New Relic got my business based on e free T-shirt, and I wouldn't have considered it without some enticement to try.

It's the testament that you were there or you did something that's the reward, over just cash.

At a tech company where I worked tech support ages ago, it was amazing how happy otherwise furious customers got when we offered them a t-shirt...

The insight here is that everybody takes t-shirts as alternative payment method for situations where paying real money would be a social faux-pas. T-shirts are more like letters of gratitude.

You can give your friends funny t-shirts to thank them helping you move, but you can't give them $20 instead without insulting them by implying that their time is worth so little.

Confession time:

The first and only software T-shirt swag I ever received permanently traumatised me and set the internet back 10 years.

I downloaded Internet Explorer 3 on launch day and received a "Midnight Madness" T-shirt for my efforts.

I'm really sorry. I was young and didn't know any better. Every day I boot up my Ubuntu laptop and try to make amends.

My problem with a T-Shirt is that I will never wear it.

Yet at the same time, I can't think of anything quite as universal to use for showing an achievement or membership.

I guess if worse comes to worse I can enchant it.[0]

[0]: http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/shirt

A jacket ?

  ...A t-shirt says something. It’s visible. You can show it off. It’s an
  invisible handshake among those who know what the t-shirt symbolizes. ...

Doesn't that actually make T-shirts the opposite of currency? The point of money is that it's all the same.

That most give-away T's do not have pockets makes them more or less useless to me.

I've become so used to wearing pocket T's (white or charcoal grey) pretty much every day that any T-shirt without a pocket now feels incomplete.

Do you use the pocket?

Yes. Are there people with a preference for pocket Ts who don't use the pocket?

The main reason I actually completed the Stripe CTF was for the t-shirt.

Even Cheaper than Indians ! ;)

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