Friday, June 15, 2007

Shop till you drop . . .I don't think so.

I love Friday’s. It’s raining and cold and likely to be the same all weekend so a surprise lunch with Thommo was a welcome invitation. We chit chat about kids, work, life the universe and everything. She’s worried that I don’t have a life. True, but only through lack of funds. So after some salient advice and deep concern – and two glasses of Goundry Chardonnay and a lovely prawn risotto, we went our separate ways. I love that girl.

The weather being so inclement, I walked through the mall. About 2kms of shops with doof doof music bouncing off the walls and all with names like Cruise, Tarocash, YD, Crush, Jeffro’s and Dotti . . .obviously marketing to the younger element. Yes there was a plethora of three-wheel motorised shopping carts being driven by ultimately focussed geriatrics . . . not focussed on impending collisions with shoppers and yummy mummies with 15 babies in the one elongated stroller but focussed on getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible. It’s amazing that normal pedestrians actually manage to negotiate the centre at all without being clipped by either a stroller or a gerry zooming out of control. Thank God they have little orange flags on the back.

And I don’t get food courts! Why when there’s a perfectly good piazza with inexpensive lunch deals, do people cluster in the cattle ring devouring their El Turko kebabs, sushi rolls, Red Rooster, KFC and MacDonalds? Or even worse the bain marie’s full of festering Chinese somethingorother and curries that smell the same when they go in as when they come out. It’s the most horrible eating environment with cleaners fussing around your every move, people bumping your chair which is cemented to the floor so it just swings in an anti clockwise direction when nudged and a TV screen in the middle of your table blasting the lunchtime news or a continuous string of commercials encouraging you to shop, eat, consume.

For some reason, the sales are on again. It seems to be perpetual these days. Summer Sales, End of Season sales, just because we can’t shift our stock sales. In fact if you pay full price for anything these days, you either really want it or your’re a sucker. Stop buying people. Consumer confidence leads to high inflation which in turn leads to an increase in interest rates and then no body will buy my bloody block!

Now I’m not a girly girl – gimme a pair of jeans and a warm jumper and I’m a happy camper - but I am drawn to a bargain (I am female after all) and of course David Jones have their half yearly clearance on and tables are strewn with shoes, discount perfume, clothing (much of which is trawled out from the previous sale) but what can a girl do? I have to walk through this den of iniquity, this tempting cave in order to see the light (or the drizzle in this case) and venture back to work.

Yeh. I did have a little browse. OK I didn’t buy anything due mainly to my current bout of poverty but I did fancy a pair of boots on the way through and - I may go back, a rather nice plush pink sweater that had been knocked down to $75 from $150 and of course Madam Rochas and Bulgari Blu is on sale for $69. Ooh ooh ooh . . .sooooo tempting. But like a brave soldier, I forged my way through the marauding women trying to find the ‘other’ shoe and the harassing shop assistants insisting that I sniff their little bits of fragrant paper . . . I sloshed just about every perfume I passed on a different pulse point while they weren’t looking. Fingered an uber trendy handbag that I almost bought since mine’s so old fashioned but remained stoic in my resolve to save money.

Now I’m back in the office, ready for the afternoon’s onslaught, so wishing I’d bought that jumper, and smelling like a tart’s boudoir. . It's a good job I hate shopping.

No comments: