I suppose I ought to be happy that I’m finally so popular, but, I don’t know, I guess I’m just not that into them any more.
“Enjoy 15% off! It’s not too late to save! Early bird special! Free shipping! 5 days only! Special savings! Extra savings! Cashmere event! Mattress event! Teak event! Save BIG! Hurry!”
There was a time when those words would have thrilled me — would have put a sparkle in my eye and sent a tingle down to that little spot at the tips of my fingers where they grip the credit cards.
Now I feel detached. The opposite of love really is not hate, but indifference. My retail suitors offer me 30-40% off, and the cynical thought forms: Come back when you can give me 70%.
Not so long ago, I was the needy one in this relationship. I admired and aspired to what they had to sell me, and if blouses suddenly had sequins along the collar I began to look with disdain at the clothes that I owned that lacked them. If hemlines went jaggedy in the stores, I no longer had a skirt to wear.
I was the supplicant, and for me it was all give-give-give. No retailer asked whether I might relish “free standard shipping on every order, no matter how small.”
Why would it? There were other fish in the sea, millions of them, and with more money to spend than I had. Retailers wielded the power in our relationship. It was dysfunctional. It was unhealthy!
But now? Oh, they all want me: J.Crew wants me; so does CVS; Neiman Marcus wants me; so does Giant. Random bizarre Internet pharmaceutical companies, makers of sterling silver jewelry, and purveyors of quaint embroidered Americana, all of them, have never been so eager to make my acquaintance.
They want you, too. It is almost pitiful – actually, it is pitiful — how desperate the retailers of our gargantuan consumer culture are… for the way we were.
“Holiday sale!” the signs plead, “Start early! Lowest prices of the fall! Special prices! Extra savings! Last call!”
At an indoor mall the other day, I could scarcely take ten steps before being lunged at by yet another anxious salesperson bearing a tray of sample goodies.
“Ma’am! Fruit smoothie?” cried one fellow. “Chocolate mousse?” another inquired, and it was only at the last moment that I managed not to drink the “ginger lemongrass hand lotion” proffered by yet another anxious, grinning clerk.
The sense of urgency that used to descend upon consumers right after Thanksgiving now runs in the other direction. Last year people woke up early to stampede each other at the Black Friday sales. It won’t be surprising if this year everyone just rolls over and drifts off to sleep again. The stuff will still be there later, after all, and maybe it’ll be marked down even more.
Consumer spending amounts to a stunning two-thirds of U.S. gross domestic product. We are the engine of our own economic growth. To adapt some recently-popular political rhetoric: We have the small change the stores are waiting for.
It’s also the case that consumers have been eagerly complicit in the glamorous illusions purveyed by retailers — illusions that are falling away before the withering breath of recession like gaudy sideshow scenery made of plywood.
The other day I happened to glance through the massive September issue of Vogue, which was put together before the bailout frenzy began. Flipping through its sumptuous pages is like looking at embarrassing snapshots from an old romance. Can we really have felt this way about each other?
Once I gazed at the ad spreads and felt desire. Now they made me laugh out loud: Page after page of models posing in comical attire such as peep-toe stiletto booties, footwear that deserves a pedestal in the Smithsonian as expressing perfectly the last goofy, unreal gasp of the Second Gilded Age.
If only it were possible for us to get out of our unhealthy relationship with shopping — to decide this Thanksgiving that we’re quitting, cold turkey.
Alas, after decades of cheap credit and long experience of the pleasures of consumption, we can’t. We’re too enmeshed! Consumers and retailers, for better or worse, are co-dependents.
Examiner Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal.
