The Mall Is Ready

You like to shop?  I don’t.  It’s an obligation to fulfill, not a craving or a joy.  Why adopt this most Un-American of attitudes?  There is the practical reason:  If you succumb to whimsical, uninhibited shopping, you’ll be broke.  There is the Gandhi-an sense that you should make do what you have.  Shop-a-holic is a noun named purposefully.  But I’m not Gandhi.  I never learned to spin my own clothes.  Eventually a time comes when you need to buy new vestments.

I’ve stated this before.  No great epiphany here.  But America has tamed the world to the American consumers'" needs.  This will continue for a while I suppose and certainly not forever.  Living in Beijing, shopping, which is already a drag, is especially bothersome.  No one has my size shoes or my waistline.  XL means M in China.  But more pressingly, shopping means buying premium high end things or settling for cheapness, (used in the Zappalian sense).  You secure premium or bottom end, but quality middle-ware is all shipped over to the United States, where the customer is king. 

Home in New York for the summer, I budget time to pursue my rights as an American consumer.  Get a new pair of shoes, get new pants, get a new shirt now.  Because later, in China it will be a much less fruitful search for these things.  My kids are far less inhibited.  “YES!  I NEED TO GO TO THE MALL.”  "Right.  OK.  So do I."  Saturday, today, is our day to shop. 

I must say that approaching the mall we realize for the fourth year straight that there is a store at the mall called “Dicks”  This is funny.  My daughter’s and I imagine the lines that may be necessary working at such a place:  (Hi.  Welcome to Dick’s.  I’m one of the Dick’s.”) 

The Mall is ready for us.  Shopping at Target feels like walking within an American cathedral.  Pausing at the nave, where men’s and women’s, kids and adults are drawn and divided, I note all my fellow Americans.  My American daughters are given what would have been an impossible sum in my day, of $200.00 each to buy what they need.  This, rather than just presenting my credit card over and over and discovering later how much I'd spent. 

I go to the shoe store and get my requisite new pair of comfortable, presentable shoes.  I get pants in Macy's.  Then I get two shits in Banana Republic.  I ignore the name.  I ignore the allure of 40% off because I am thinking more like a business person than a shopper.  My daughters need more time.  I ‘harumph’ but use this time to drop my bags off in the car and return to the Cathedral to get cheap underwear, teeshirts and socks.  I even find a cheap pair of jeans.  Why pay more?  

We've been here so much longer than we intended.