May 18 - 25, 2000
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As fantastic as evolution is, sometimes it screws up. For reasons that I may never understand, I was born without a crucial segment of DNA that helps define the entire female gender. I do not have the shopping gene. Shopping dropout
Life without the shopping gene
by Kris Frieswick
Maybe my mother had a traumatic experience at the Pic 'N Pay while I was still in utero. Maybe I was conceived after a long, brutal day of returning Christmas presents. It really doesn't matter. Today I walk through life a freak among women. As I sit alone, package-less, on the bench outside Bloomingdale's, waiting for my friends to finish their shopping bacchanal, I can feel the unspoken questions of the young children as they pass. "Mommy, why isn't that lady shopping?" their eyes seem to ask. Their mothers whisk them off to GapKids without saying a word, fearful that I might be contagious.
I am fully aware that I am missing something big. I search for an understanding of the joy I see in my friends' faces when they score a great deal at Frugal Fannie's. I yearn to share the excited, near-orgiastic state they reach after an afternoon in Cole-Haan. Instead, I usually politely refuse when invited on shopping trips. I feign excitement for their purchases, but, in truth, they have feelings and emotions that I will never feel.
The first sign of my genetic deficiency reared up when my mother dragged me to the Sears at the Auburn Mall and forced me to try on Toughskins. I hated the plastic smell of the store. The fluorescent lighting gave me a headache. I had to dress and undress, clothing off and on, off and on. My eyes burned trying to comprehend the endless aisles of endless racks filled with stuff. And then there were all the people, some of them smelly, buying things they may or may not have needed, spending money they may or may not have had. I got sweaty. My head began to spin. "Mom, I want to go back to the car," I squeaked as the world began to get blurry. "Not until you try on this great little Garanimals twin set. This color pink will look great on you," she offered cheerfully. I don't remember much after that.That was decades ago, and my condition has only worsened. I'm to the point now where, if I do find myself in a store, usually against my will, I don't even see the stuff anymore. It's just a big blur of $40 T-shirts and asymmetrically cut miniskirts and glazed terra-cotta nacho platters and flatware and trench coats and faux-Shaker high-back chairs and zillions of pieces of artfully arranged glassware, swirling around and around like a demonic carousel of shiny crap. If it were not for the fact that I must shop in order to procure food, clothing, and shelter, I wouldn't do it at all. There are just far too many ways to spend a Saturday afternoon other than being cooped up in a mall somewhere, getting sick to my stomach, listening to a Muzak rendition of "Under My Thumb." Instead, I could be in my basement, pulling out each and every one of my fingernails with a pair of needle-nose pliers.
But even I must venture out into Retail Land for essentials. When I do, I look at it like a trip to the dentist, an evil dentist who doesn't believe in Novocain. Like most dentophobes, I wait way, way too long between visits. Because of this, my clothing tends toward the classic, one might say timeless. I own and regularly wear clothes that I bought in
college.For items that are not conducive to Internet purchase, which I'm convinced was invented just for me and people like me, I employ guerrilla shopping tactics. First, I identify the target: say, a new pair of jeans to replace the seven-year-old ones with the two ripped knees and the torn crotch seam. I then identify the store at which to conduct the purchase, known in the lingo as "obtaining the target." I call the local jeans purveyor (always a place where there is ample parking -- no garages), and I ask them to pull jeans in a range of sizes (your dimensions change a bit in seven years) and leave them at the front desk. I travel to the store. I park. With all the speed I can muster, I conduct a full breach of the establishment through the front door and proceed to the front desk, where I take possession of the merchandise and go into the dressing room. There, because I have worn slip-off shoes and my baggiest pants, I can try on up to four pairs of jeans in less than two minutes. A choice is made. I proceed to the checkout line.
This is where things get dicey.
You see, as much as my genetic aberration has sucked the joy of shopping from my life, it has provided me with the chance to see things that the average, genetically whole consumer cannot see. You know the scene in The Matrix when Keanu Reeves learns that his entire life has been nothing but an extremely realistic computer program, created and governed by highly evolved machines that are actually using human beings as electrical sources to power their world? Unlike you, I can see that the people who run these stores use a form of merchandising mind-control that taps into a human being's most basic evolutionary tendencies, tendencies that we do not even know we have.These Matrix merchandisers know what most people are going to think before they even think it. They know which way you are going to look first when you walk into the store, and they put the most high-margin items right in your face. They know which colors are most pleasing to the average human, which ones will draw you in, which ones will repel you. They understand how to direct you through an entire store following the path they want you to take. They know exactly how tall your three-year-old is, and they put stuff he'll like at his eye level in the checkout line, while putting the baseball cards and Hot Wheels at your 11-year-old's eye level. And most of you are doing exactly as they want. But not me.
Like Keanu, I am doomed to pass through life seeing the carefully orchestrated retail reality that the rest of you have mistaken for a pleasant shopping experience. So, as I stand in that checkout line with my jeans, all I want to do is shout at the top of my lungs, "Wake up, you drones! They're only using you to power their world!" But then they'd probably make me go to another store for the jeans.
Kris Frieswick can be reached at krisf1@gte.net.
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