Ken Whitmire Associates:
Untitled [interior of a store] (c. 1940, restored 1970s)

"I preferred the neighborhood hardware store over the Home Despot …"

Shopping seemed less a necessity in DC than a pastime. Sundays, it seemed people flocked to shopping malls and Big Box Stores. Parking lots filled, and a seemingly sacred commerce commenced. Somebody would always be in the market for a mattress, so they were always on sale, never not! Families seemed to promenade around shopping centers as if on display themselves. Kiosks featuring the most curious businesses attracted what appeared to be primarily teenage girls. We would go when The Muse deemed necessary, for I would never even imagine going to such places unassisted. Truth told, I'd often cool my heels in the car instead of accompanying her inside, for those places always seemed so out of scale they terrified me. Further, our recent bankruptcy had left me with an aversion to buying stuff. I figured I could hold off buying things until they were really needed, and if my luck held, I'd never need to buy anything but groceries again.

Back home, we didn't have Big Box stores, so I never needed to learn how to navigate them. In DC, we found plenty, but gratefully, most seemed eminently avoidable. My aversion to purchasing furniture protected me from ever needing to enter into an Ikea. I'd wandered into a CostCo once, during my first marriage, after one Christmas when my company gifted employees with CostCo memberships. I was not impressed. Not only had we driven halfway to Salem, but once inside, we couldn't find anything worth buying. Our home didn't feature warehouse space to hold a decade's inventory of toilet paper. We never bought meat by the twenty-weight. We left grateful that we'd probably never find a reason to enter that place again.

Target became our one concession to Big Box shopping. We went there to purchase our paper goods and cleaning products. It took me a few visits before I overcame my natural aversion to entering huge stores. Fifteen years later, I still cannot figure out Target's checkout arrangement. I let The Muse guide the way into that. I never shop. I never enter a store without a definite notion of what I'll be leaving with, and I rarely stray from that list. I might happen upon something else, but I will never enter to "shop." The Muse is different. She seems to enjoy shopping, idly strolling down aisles piled high with absolute crap, but I do not. I'm more apt to quickly fill the cart with what we came to buy, me having remembered the shortest route through the mess. Then, I'm ready to leave. I've been known to tell her I'd meet her back at the car so my fidgeting wouldn't impede her shopping. I loathe shopping and figure that idling in the car doing nothing amounts to a superior use of my precious time.

When we relocated to DC, Walmart had yet to enter the market there. Not that the presence of WalMart would have influenced us. We had a Walmart back home but never shopped there because we'd once consulted with a company that had been the beneficiary of WalMart's predatory practices. They'd signed an agreement granting sole supplier status to some successful vendor and then came back a year later after the said vendor had focused their business solely on supplying WalMart and demanded a ten percent lower price as a condition for continuing their arrangement. A few years later, the supplier was laying off employees and cutting benefits to stave off going out of business. WalMart practices the most heartless form of capitalism known, the sort that reliably offers ever decreasing prices while guaranteeing the owners ever greater profits. They trade in austerity, the absolute antithesis of prosperity, and I won't trade with them for nothing. I'd rather trade with Mephistopheles.

The other BigBox stores can go to Hell for all I care. I cannot cope with their scale, which seems inhuman to me. I am not for a second comforted by vast selections. I prefer my retailers to help me avoid the nefarious paradox of choice where a nearly infinite array of alternatives still doesn't yield an acceptable one. We're daily shoppers. We might stock up almost a week in advance but prefer to check in and see what's fresh that day. I like to buy for a specific supper. I maintain a well-stocked larder of ingredients and accompaniments: pastas, rices, and beans. I prefer my entreés to be fresh that day. DC offered a variety of European-style shopping alternatives, places owned by a proprietor rather than vulture capital. Places where I might conduct a meaningful conversation with someone familiar with the variations between whatever they sell. I collected my list of reliable vendors, much to the confusion of my benefactor neighbor Clair, who claimed to be the opposite of a gourmet. The Muse and I were picky in our own way. I preferred the neighborhood hardware store over the Home Despot and the Ugly Veg Store over Safeway's produce aisle. (More about The Ugly Veg Store later.)

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled