© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 141
I hate shopping. I hate the tedium of going out and looking for things. The last time I enjoyed shopping was on my honeymoon, when a flush bank balance allowed me to walk through a bookshop and earn the admiration of everyone by buying armloads of books. It took all of fifteen minutes.
My particular hatred: clothes shopping. I don’t find any particular fulfilment in careful selection. To my mind, it’s easiest just to find a shirt that fits and buy a whole bunch of the same, in different colours, if available. If they aren’t available, that’s fine: the same colour will do. Clothes are things that cover my body. Shoes cover my feet. No need to get fancy.
I don’t like the queuing either; jockeying for the fastest line, only to find that a SNAFU with a card means a far longer wait than hanging around behind the old lady with the two trolleys full of dog food and a head full of questions about their nutritional value for Fido.
And the unpacking gets to me as well, especially the bit where I have to rearrange the kitchen as everything has shifted elsewhere since the last major shopping trip a couple of weeks ago. Some people get a kick out of ordering things around and making sure that everything is stashed just so. It’s just not me.
Whoever invented ‘retail therapy’ didn’t have me in mind.
Shopping used to be fun. There was definitely some form of pre-adolescent hormonal activity involved in cruising up and down the shelves of the toy store or hanging around the comics shelves of the local bookstore, defying the disapproving glares of adults who believed they knew better.
But somewhere along the line, someone came up with the idea that the activity of walking through a bunch of shelves was a form of inspiration that could replace personal creativity: ‘you don’t have to make something new, you can just look through a bunch of magazines and then go out and buy it’. This sort of instant personal definition is a very post modern approach in much the same way as liposuction replaces exercise.
It is probably the same demented person who came up with the idea that pushing through crowds and standing in a queue are a decent substitute for meditation and personal relaxation. Yet strangely enough, standing in a queue for a license or a form have not taken off in a big way in spite of the minimalist Zen-like potential that bureaucracy holds for us all.
Yet technology may be my salvation, at least as far as shopping goes. The sleeve notes of one of the Talking Heads albums noted that ‘in the future, coffee cups with talk to one another’. It seems as if scientists found the idea worthy of pursuit.
Their invention is the radio-frequency identity device, with the acronym RFID. Apparently these little marvels not only mark the presence of some or other product, but may also be able to say how much is left over. If the kitchen is properly wired up, it could for instance send a message to your mobile that you need to start thinking about breakfast cereals, and that the brand you stock is the noxious pink ones that are so sweet they give you a headache.
According to theorists, this electronic list will then be transmitted to your favourite supermarket, when you go to the mall, along with the information that your pants are threadbare and you need new shirts in your favourite colour.
A trip to the mall will involve arriving at the mall, sitting down at a coffee shop, sending the messages to a central computer which will make sure that your orders are filled without you having to drag yourself through shelves.
The benefit of this system, currently in development is that you will have more time… for shopping.
Sometimes, no matter which way you look at it, things really refuse to make sense.
On the other hand, there might be room in the market for a revival of that quaint, old tradition. If you are younger than about seventy, shop used to deliver to your house.
Shopping… can’t live without it, can’t bear doing it. I wish there was an alternative, now.
