Shopping

My daughter needed to buy a dress for an occasion coming up, so off we went shopping. I’m not a great shopper at the best of times. That’s Robert. I’m more of the in-and-out-let’s-get this-over-with kind of shopper. But you can’t do that when the dress has to actually look good on someone, so we did some proper shopping, and I got to see what it feels like to go through all the stages, and we came home with an ooh! and aah! prize after all. Feels kind of good, really, though I don’t plan to make it a habit and waste the novelty.

Robert likes shopping because he sees it as the simple economic exchange that it is. As he might put it, “I have need of this to help my business grow or my family eat, so I give you money, and you hand over the goods.” Robert can put a bid on Ebay for some tool he wants to take to a Mixtec carpenter, and he knows exactly what it’s worth, and if the bids go too high, he simply shrugs and walks away. He can do this with big things, too, like plane fares and cars. I, on the other hand, feel shopping as a tug of war. Except when it’s about simple things like milk or tomatoes, I keep wondering whether I really need it. Then, when I decide I do, but it’s out of my price range, I feel the pressure to buy, especially here in Oz. Boy, does this culture know how to apply that pressure! And it bugs me. (Robert doesn’t even feel it.) I wish I could turn it off, but then our civilization would implode, wouldn’t it.

So back to the shopping.  Elai and I started our adventure at the This Is Way Too Expensive Store. (Somehow you can just tell by the décor.) Everything on the racks in this store was beyond our (my) price range. When I gasped at the price tag of an accessory that outdid the price tag on the dress, I got the look. I’m not supposed to let on. From there we went to the High Pressure Store. The sales lady kept bringing beautiful things to the change room, and no one was looking at tags because that’s, well, embarrassing, and the perfect dress surfaced, and the sales lady kept up a one-woman chorus of  “Ooh, aah…it’s perfect on you…matches your skin color so well…very flattering waist line…don’t you think so?…

So what do you do when your daughter is smiling, and the dress is beautiful, and the lady is going on and on, putting on the pressure? Maybe you hide behind the “We’ll think about it” line and walk away. Then the sky clouds over. You know you are never going to find the right dress, and your daughter will have to settle for some frumpy thing and resent you forever (you are obviously not thinking straight), and where is Robert when you need him?

Fortunately, we found the magical Hole in the Wall Store with a stunning dress (my daughter makes it stunning) and an acceptable price, and we came home happy. But there’s no guarantee. The pressure to buy can make you do crazy things. I remember the very first time I walked through a mall. It was Christmas, and I was 15, having moved to Oregon from Honduras to finish high school. I remember looking in the windows and for the first time in my life feeling a pull, an almost physical force, drawing me to buy something (a big white teddy bear, as I recall) that I did not need. I had never felt this temptation before. There were no malls in Honduras, and consumerism was yet to strike in our small town. Either that, or I was growing up. And embarrassment can come to sit on your shoulder when you don’t live up to expectations or keep up with the Joneses. (I remember overhearing in a bathroom, “I look like a missionary!” Heaven forbid.) And self-deception can arrive as a house guest when you buy whatever catches your eye. So in Oz I realize you live with this tension all the time. Isn’t it tiring?