I would not wish to suggest that I have completed all my Christmas shopping before the end of the first week of December. But, in fact, I am rounding in on most of my gifts, and I know what I am getting you! A lump of coal! I think that a little less than half my gifts will be bought on-line again this year, about average for me. Right now, items are getting shipped out of warehouses across North America, destined for a space under those Christmas trees for which I have responsibility – via Canada Post, of course.
I cannot help but reflect, as a child of Newfoundland in the 1970s and 1980s, how shopping has come full circle for me. My experience in St. John’s was that my choices were dictated by the modest inventories of those retailers brave enough to set up shop at the most easterly point of the continent. I am neither a sociologist nor a retail historian, but there was certainly a thrill in my adolescent past in discovering an item when Christmas shopping that I had not thought even existed. That must have been the last echo of my hunter/gatherer past reasserting itself. There are few such thrills left in the contemporary shopping experience. We all know what is out there, but if your local shopping choices are dictated by what Lethbridge stores get to carry, you still feel some of the longings of a Newfoundland child.
Then, as now, there were more extreme options. An autumn trip “up along,” say to Halifax or Montreal or Toronto, might widen choices, and even a journey to a smaller Newfoundland community might present some exotic gifting opportunities. Today, of course, I can drive to Calgary. But the autumn in Newfoundland also brought out the mail order catalogues: Sears, primarily, but also Eatons when I was very young and L. L. Bean as I got older. Now, of course, internet shopping is limited only by how much shipping costs and how much hassle might come from dealing with an online retailer. In the past couple of years, I have given or received books from France, posters from Ireland, and films and music from the United States. There is no longer any thrill of discovery, though: joy now comes from finding a good deal or easy shipping. We can get nearly everything we can imagine if we just know where to look for it. It is like those early catalogues taken to their furthest degree.
But where has all this taken us? Our local bookstore or music retailer can never compete with its online counterparts, so they try to do nothing more than market to the lowest common denominator. It takes all the hunter/gatherer purpose out of a trip to the mall. Perhaps only things like clothing or jewelry that you really should see or feel or try retain their retail consequence; perhaps a little price comparison shopping is the only justification for going to the mall at all. In this climate, what is to curb our consumption, anyway? Lack of credit? I remember when it was an achievement to get a credit card, and now they are mailed out pre-approved. It is a real challenge to the delayed gratification so central to my protestant upbringing. We now always expect to get what we want, and that is the real news.
