Skip to main content

Retail Phobia

After many months of being tethered to the desk even at lunch-hour, I stepped out to the cafeteria with a few other co-workers. One woman was complaining about how much she hates shopping for clothes and how badly her wardrobe is in need of replenishment. Everyone shared her sentiments with the exception of our resident style maven Judy. Turns out that some of us (including myself) hate shopping of any kind and would love nothing more than to never have to go inside a store.

Forget about retail therapy, the grouchiest among us probably suffer from full blown retail phobia. The idea of circling round and round the parking lot until I find a spot is enough to kill any enthusiasm that I might have mustered to check out a big sale at the nearby mall. Judy being slave to fashion, cannot afford to have a wardrobe several seasons too old like the rest of us. Increasingly, she finds herself shopping online and avoiding the mall.

Judy may be part of a larger trend here - even for the conspicuous consumer shopping is not nearly as therapeutic as it used to be. The author of the FastCompany article, talks about malls creating the French market and Moroccan bazaar ambience to engender a distinctive shopping experience. However, without the authenticity of place and time, that would resemble a theme park and possibly make shopping even more irksome.

It is bad enough to deal with the deathly monotony of retail chains without compounding the evil by introducing an ersatz foreign theme around its periphery. Now, we'll have to compete for parking with both shoppingistas and carnivalers. A visit to the dentist to get some root canal work done sounds far more appealing.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
With gas prices rising and home equity falling, I am not surprised that people are no longer seeing the therapeutic part of spending. This holiday season is not going to be a happy one for stores..
9:47 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more