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Will We Ever Be Able to Shop Again?
Online shopping has worn out its charms. I long to return to the sensory delights of retail.
I miss shopping. I really do. I love shopping; I love wandering around a store, seeing the goods, evaluating the displays, marveling at the merchandise. I love acquiring things, but even more, I love the process of being in the world of stuff, high and low, useful and frivolous. I am just as happy looking at the absurdly overpriced merch in a Rodeo Drive boutique as I am in a Harbor Freight or a Dollar Store. I’m just interested in what we humans create. It’s the amateur anthropologist in me, wandering the rows at Target.
I shop like crazy when I travel (that is, back when we traveled). In the olden days, before retail globalization, before you could buy Gap sweatshirts in Bangkok and before Zara had leaped from Spain to every single street corner in New York City, part of the fun of shopping while traveling was finding things you couldn’t find at home. But the biggest part of it was just seeing what the people of, say, London or Madrid or Houston or wherever, encountered when they went shopping. If people asked me what I had done on a particular trip, I would always say I had spent time at the Museum of Consumer Goods, which sounded classier than saying I had spent hours in the biggest department store…
