This past weekend I took my wife shopping at Target.
I haven’t been to a Target for a long time. In fact, I haven’t gone shopping in person anywhere, except Home Depot and the grocery store, for at least 2 years.
I do as little shopping as possible. When I must buy something, I usually do it online. On the rare occasions my wife wants to shop at the mall or department store, I usually refuse to go.
But my wife needed some items she had to try on, she needed them quickly and she needed me to take her there because her back was out.
So I sucked it up and off we went.
I’m a people watcher, so it was kind of fascinating.
Since I’ve intentionally quarantine myself from consumerism over the past decade, this trip turned into a people watching event. Here’s what I observed:
Parking. The first thing I noticed was how many people circle the parking looking for a parking spot as close to the front door as possible. I can sympathize with this for those with limited mobility, an injury or a bad back. But it appeared that most of the circlers were younger than me and in good shape.
Since Ellen’s back was acting up, I dropped her off at the door and quickly found a spot “far away”. (It took me at least 45 seconds to walk from my car to the door, but I made it there safely).
The Back-to-School Scam. As soon as I entered the store I encountered huge colorful signs promoting back-to-school sales. Now that I’m long past school age, I realize that most school clothing, backpacks and supplies that were used last year don’t need to be replaced. Back-to-school season is a marketing gimmick that convinces us to buy more stuff we don’t really need. TV news is complicit, local charities get involved in fundraising for “new supplies” and even my state encourages this with a sales tax free weekend for school shopping.
Imagine, if instead of teaching our children they needed to wear new clothes and have the latest backpack, we taught them how to reuse, recycle and repair things we handed down for generations and instead invested the money we would have spent in an index fund so they could work less.
Now that would be cause for a real back-to-school celebration. Target would disagree. I think a lot of the shoppers would too.
The New Fashion Scam. The next thing I noticed was how clothing dominated more than half the store. There were brands I’d never heard of, styles I haven’t seen and lots of fluorescent color schemes. Nearly all of the shoppers had carts full of these latest fashions.
Judging from how these shoppers were dressed, they already owned the latest fashions. It didn’t appear to me that they needed new clothes. (I was obviously an outlier in my old T-shirt, khaki shorts and drab sneakers.)
Shopping as Entertainment. As I mentioned at the beginning, it’s been awhile since I’ve gone shopping. I forgot about shopping as entertainment.
I watched (mostly) women of all ages who were clearly not shopping for anything specific. They were looking for something (anything) to buy. They wandered from rack to rack checking out shoes, shirts, pants, jewelry, toys, purses, belts, housewares, towels and anything else that caught their eye. It was like browsing the Internet – except in real life!
As they jumped from rack to rack, they casually added one thing after another to their carts, rarely pausing to even look at the price tag.
It made me grateful for my less consumer driven lifestyle today.
As entertaining as it was for me, I was glad to get out of there. My wife got the 3 items she needed and we were out of there in less than an hour.
As I drove out of the lot in my trusty old Toaster, I saw people loading cartfuls of bags of new purchases into their shiny new cars.
I don’t want their lifestyles, their cars or their stuff. I wouldn’t even want it if it was free.
stuffifit was free.