We already know this rule: You aren’t permitted to leave a museum without running into a gift shop. I also discovered late last week in Paris that you can’t walk out of the newly restored Notre-Dame cathedral without passing a large gift zone near the arrow that points to Sortie de secours. And you can’t even leave a country, really, without exiting passport control on the way to the gate and passing — not by, but through — a duty-free shopping zone through which snakes a zig-zaggy path to your gate. Before you leave anywhere, in other words, there’s a gentle shakedown, with shiny objects (museum jewelry, clickety-clacky rosaries, bottles of perfume, you get the idea) distracting you on the way to the exit.
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Call it the Grocery Store Principle: Make them walk through the cookies and the candy on the way to the stuff you really came for, which is always in the back. You’ve had a nice visit to one of the oldest and most important cathedrals in the world, but before you go, “Can we interest you in a scented candle? A wooden icon? A pair of earrings?“
It didn’t used to be like this. Duty-free, for instance, used to be just a store. It had a defined space, one of the alcoves in the airport terminal, along with the one with the newspapers and the one with the weird toilet seat-shaped pillows and the one with the Cinnabons, and you could pass right by all of them on your way to the gate, or the Panda Express. You had a choice, in other words.
But at some point in the last 20 years, the international brain trust that runs airports noticed that people weren’t buying enough cologne, so now, there is no store. Instead, there’s a route. You come out of passport control, technically in a stateless space, and the first thing the local authorities want to know is whether you’ve considered investigating a new signature scent.
Or maybe it went like this: After struggling through the check-in area, the switchback nightmare of passport control, the pat-downs and general chaos of the security lines, even the kind of people who arrive at the airport three hours early feel a little rushed and behind schedule. So, when they’re finally on the way to the gate, maybe it’s hard to get them into the mood to buy a Longchamp handbag or a new skin care regimen unless they can’t get where they’re going any other way.
And it works. On me, anyway. If I have a little time before they start boarding Group 23, I’ll always stop for the La Roche-Posay moisturizer with SPF 50, which comes in a handy pump bottle and was recommended to me by my dermatologist, who told me to stop calling my complexion “naturally ruddy” and start thinking of it as “pre-cancerous pink.” So, I’ll buy the La Roche-Posay, even if it is a joyless kind of purchase.
That’s if I have time. But even if I don’t really have time — even if they’re already boarding Group 7 and Group 8 and getting close to my usual Group 23 — I’ll look for the only duty-free section that really interests me. Almost every foreign airport, big or small, has a place where they keep the cigars. In the little airports, it’s a glass box, humidified, about the size of a phone booth, always with a lock. In the big ones — your De Gaulles, your Istanbul Internationals — it’s an actual room, a walk-in humidor with a door that sighs shut when it closes behind you, like the doors on Star Trek. Inside are shelves and shelves of Cuban cigars, the real ones, the ones you can’t buy in the United States and aren’t allowed to bring in.
The duty-free maze is designed to lead you somewhere you didn’t mean to go, but I go straight to the one place I meant to go all along, and I stand there, in the humidor room, and I look.
Which is all I do. Because bringing them home would be against the law, and I would never.
AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNEY REVEALS AMERICA DOES MOST THINGS RIGHT
Never ever.
Never ever ever.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
