At the end of last week, we published our list of the 25 best clothing stores in New York. Scroll through it and tell me what we nailed and what we left out.

Working on this list was personal. My first several jobs in New York were in retail. I toiled at J. Crew’s flagship in the Flatiron district folding gingham shirt after gingham shirt, and in the windowless basement of Club Monaco’s SoHo shop selling chinos to junior associates.

My longest stint was at Epaulet, a modern men’s haberdashery that at the time had two tidy locations, one on the Lower East Side and the other in south Brooklyn. I spent a couple of years there selling calf-tight dress pants and double monks to the sort of persnickety men who read forums about clothing in their off time. (It was, let’s say, a very specific time in men’s fashion.)

I loved that job. Yes, it paid my rent. But treading the sales floor, I received an education on how people shop: through practicality, joy, indulgence and, occasionally, fear.

I watched shoppers sweat over buying pants in a size 33 or size 34 as if they were Magellan weighing what course to take to circumnavigate the globe. I will never forget the guy who refused to unbutton the dress shirts — or use a fitting room, for that matter — and stood there on a busy Saturday tugging blue shirts over his bare torso as if any extra second spent shopping was a second wasted. I remember the man from overseas who saved up, for months, if not years, for a single pair of Horween leather boots. And I remember, too, how I felt, funneling portions of my paychecks back to my employer so I, too, could buy my own blazers and dress shirts.