Women Who Love to Shop
The other day I met someone who spent most of her time discussing shopping trips. She managed to start off wiht her opinion about shopping in Queensland, moved onto Sydney and Melbourne and then started on stories of international shopping trips she had undertaken.She told me that she is planning to take her husband on a trip to Hawaii next year. As a fan of Hawaii and local Hawaiian culture, I became animated at this point and started giving her tips about places to visit - the Polynesian Cultural Centre, Pearl Harbour, The Aloha Stadium, Waimea Falls Park etc. This information fell on deaf ears as all she wanted to hear about was where she could go shopping.
Personally, I am not a fan of shopping. My style is to get in and get out as quickly as possible. I am not big on browsing - unless of course it's in bookshops and then I could stay all day - but as far as clothes, cosmetics and shoes etc are concerned -I am really not that interested. I find shopping, including trips to warehouses and all day events, not only amazingly boring, but terribly vacuous.
I would rather be in an art gallery, cinema, the beach, a park, reading, conversing over a nice meal, writing or even driving! than shopping for hours on end. I find the fluro lights, the mad gleam in people's eyes when they spot a bargain and the beep beep of the cash registers, quite stressful.
For this woman to then be able to speak ad nauseum about shopping, for two hours plus, alarmed me. Apart from trips to Westfields and other mega plexes, I wondered what else she has in her life. What lies beneath the empty endless parade to the shops? I felt that really her stance was that of a "having mentality" a grasping desire to get acces to more and more material things.
posted by Fiona McNally @ 11/19/2005 07:47:00 am
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