Let My Fingers do the Walking
I mostly avoided stores this year, finding it considerably less crowded in my home office. With the click of my mouse, thoughtful gifts show up at my front door within a day or few. As of this writing, I’m thinking the extra price for express delivery may have been a wise investment.
One big problem that presents (no pun intended) itself is that I have to do my Christmas shopping much earlier, meaning several days before the Blessed Event. Christmas Eve used to suffice, at least for some Christmases past. I found the stores and malls considerably less crowded in the evening of the Eve. I also found them considerably less stocked, but usually managed to find a few items deemed more than adequate by the recipients.
It appears that many people have taken to shopping online, except when it comes to my site, Barrier Island Art, found at www.islanderart.com I guess web surfers think my site is only about art, although such is not the case.
Fortunately, my wife possesses that common female trait of shopping early, usually somewhere around a day or two after Christmas, so everything she orders for me gets here well ahead of time. She also loves giving me things, for some unexplained reason, so my twelve days of Christmas stretches to about twenty or so, but not really a daily thing. She often manages to find excuses to give me some early presents, assuring me that I’ll still have plenty to open on Christmas Day. In reality, I’m usually wearing and/or using the more expensive items by then, so the presents I open on Christmas lean more toward the stocking stuffer genre, but I wouldn’t have it any other way!
We made it to a couple of stores, though. BJ’s Wholesale Club comes to mind. It’s one of those discount places that feels like shopping in a warehouse. Most everything is cheap, as long as you’re willing to convert a spare bedroom into a pantry big enough to store the huge boxes and cans.
Anyway, our local BJ’s deemed their giant shopping carts inadequate, so they replaced them with double-wides. The lady shoppers no longer need to cling to the cart to ensure blocking the entire aisle. The cart alone performs the task quite well. It adds one more dimension of pleasure to your total shopping experience. No checker ever asks if you want paper or plastic, because they have no paper or plastic. Instead, they afford you the opportunity to rummage through a bin of discarded boxes, most of them pretty much useless.
My point is, shoppers managed quite well to create total chaos with the smaller, large carts. Giving them larger large carts puts them on a par with the average 80-year-old Cadillac driver behind the wheel of a large motor home during rush hour.
After describing my out-of-home shopping experience, I feel thankful to be back at my computer, with every item conceivable just a few clicks away. Now, if only I can figure out what to do with that 55-gallon drum of Gatorade we bought.