In Defense Of: Coatrooms

Twelve years ago, eating club coatrooms made world news — okay, maybe just Princeton news — as the scene of what seemed like the most despicable kind of crime possible: coat theft. In 2000, the police arrested three people for piling nine stolen coats from Colonial into the back of a pickup truck, but the culprits were clearly wrongfully arrested. These were not criminals; they were merely practicing the kind of honest capitalism that eating club coatrooms encourage. Contrary to popular belief, coatrooms are designed to enhance the evening clubgoer’s experience and hone their investment skills.

We all know that one drunk chick who’s running off to her — or more likely, someone else’s — room wearing a coat that’s obviously three sizes too large for her: your coat, the coat that you would probably angrily snatch back from her if you knew she had it. Forget the fact that she clearly needs it more than you, since the rest of her is basically, well, exposed to the elements. If only you weren’t on the dance floor, wishing that everything wasn’t quite so blurry and forgetting altogether that cold, wintry life outside your eating club of choice! Instead, you come back to the coatroom ready to embrace the cold because, to be frank, you’re feeling kind of warm from all that dancing. But you forget that warmth almost immediately once you stumble around a little and figure out that the coat you’re holding in your hands, the one you picked up from the hook on which you originally hung your own jacket, is not yours. It also smells questionable, but it’s 2 a.m., and at this point you’re not sure if that smell is coming from the coat, the men’s bathroom located right next to the coatroom or you. Even though you’re still in the heated coatroom, you start to shiver.

If you’re lucky, your coat is at the bottom of that unappetizing pile of jackets in the corner out of which that one dude seems to have made a dragon’s den. Though it may seem like he’s merely a drunk guy looking for a soft place to sit, in reality he’s a wealth maximizer who is intentionally hoarding all those overpriced jackets. As you wrestle with him while still trying to make sure he doesn’t pass out on you, you manage to pull out your coat. It smells like Beast and a few other things that your nose can’t quite place — or doesn’t want to — but you now have the guarantee that you don’t have to walk home trying to make sure you don’t get frostbite. Plus, you can’t beat the kind of satisfaction that comes with digging out your black North Face from that sea of identical black North Faces. The coatroom has ensured that your walk home will be one filled with the quiet satisfaction of having successfully completed a treasure hunt of the variety that only multiple drunk people can engineer. All in all, you leave the club satisfied, not complaining about the cold as you would have done if you were coatless but instead feeling subconsciously buzzed about your victory against the dude on the pile of coats and incredibly grateful that you don’t have to walk home in just that tank top and pair of shorts. And all that buzz was because of an eating club coatroom.

If you’re not so lucky and your black North Face has mysteriously vanished, fret not. Simply choose from the variety of black North Faces hanging neatly upon the surrounding hooks. Picking from the pile that the dragon dude has claimed is not recommended. Also, think about it: How do all those coats end up on the floor? Is anyone really cruel enough to pull someone else’s coat off a hook so that they can hang their own jacket up in its place? The answer is “heck yes,” and this leaves you with two pieces of information: 1) Knowing what a tool this person is, you probably won’t feel quite as bad stealing — er, replacing — your own jacket with his, and 2) The fact that he cared that much about his jacket in the first place probably means that it was pretty damn expensive. Bonus point: As you walk back with your nice new coat, you stand a chance to win the contents of the previous owner’s pockets. You may find anything ranging from a $100 J.Crew voucher to a sack full of teeth. Hopefully it’s the former.

So, in the end, you serve to profit greatly from the eating club coatroom, and really the whole thing is a cyclical scheme designed by club founders to be lucrative to clubgoers. That one drunk chick who stole your jacket in the first place is probably not looking so dumb anymore, is she? Moreover, from now on, you’ll be able to play a rousing game of “spot-my-black-North-Face” whenever you go to Frist and forever wonder which one of them was formerly yours.